How to handle empty cells in R markdown?

Question

I have an R analysis that I want to present in an R markdown table. The table's layout demands some empty cells:

x <- c(1:14)

Header1 | Header2 | Header3  | Header4
------- | ------- | -------- | -------
Label1  | LabelA  | `r x[1]` | `r x[4]`
Label2  | LabelB  | `r x[2]` | `r x[5]`
        | LabelC  | `r x[3]` | `r x[6]`
        | LabelD  |          | `r x[7]`
------- | ------- | -------- | -------                    
Label3  | LabelA  | `r x[8]` | `r x[11]`
Label4  | LabelB  | `r x[9]` | `r x[12]`
        | LabelC  | `r x[10]`| `r x[13]`
        | LabelD  |          | `r x[14]`

However, those empty cells are causing the layout to break, ie, LabelC appears directly under Label2 even though it is supposed to be one column over.

I know, from searching on this issue, that you can't merge table cells in R Markdown. But can I fill those cells with code such that they will present as empty? I tried filling them with r NULL but nothing happened.

If typing the table manually is the only option, I'll do it, but I'm shocked that there is no "empty cell" solution. Every programmer should be prepared for a user to pass the null set as an argument! — mmyoung77, Sep 07 '18 at 18:40

Stéphane Laurent · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-07T18:54:36.640

The problem with this table is that it does not have the style required by rmarkdown. The table below has the good style and there's no issue with this table:

| Header1 | Header2 | Header3  | Header4   |
|:-------:|:-------:|:--------:|:---------:|
| Label1  | LabelA  | `r x[1]` | `r x[4]`  |
| Label2  | LabelB  | `r x[2]` | `r x[5]`  |
|         | LabelC  | `r x[3]` | `r x[6]`  |
|         | LabelD  |          | `r x[7]`  |
| ------- | ------- | -------- | --------- |                    
| Label3  | LabelA  | `r x[8]` | `r x[11]` |
| Label4  | LabelB  | `r x[9]` | `r x[12]` |
|         | LabelC  | `r x[10]`| `r x[13]` |
|         | LabelD  |          | `r x[14]` |

You can generate such a table with the pander package, function pandoc.table with the option style="rmarkdown", or with knitr::kable. Both have an option for dealing with the missing values.

How to handle empty cells in R markdown?

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