Feature request: Allow further customisation of kable() table header

[mruessler]

I would like to be able to create tables in the style that Jira is using. Jira uses a slightly different version of the knitr::kable(format = "pipe") output. Instead of having a header line separated by a data-void line, two consecutive pipe symbols are used.

# Hand-crafted table from BOD data
|| Time|| demand||
|     1|     8.3|
|     2|    10.3|
|     3|    19.0|
|     4|    16.0|
|     5|    15.6|
|     7|    19.8|

See also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68308461 for an example. This links to a SO question I asked.
Since then I looked into table.R in order to find out whether I could use additional parameters for a call to kable().
But it looks like this is currently impossible. Then I wanted to at least remove the separator line between header and table body using sep.row from kable_mark() to spare me the removal later. This is what I tried:

data("BOD")
y <- head(BOD)
knitr::kable(y, format = "pipe", sep.row = c(NA, NA, NA))
> Error in if (sep.col == "|") for (j in seq_len(ncol(x))) { : 
  missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed
In addition: Warning message:
In if (sep.col == "|") for (j in seq_len(ncol(x))) { :
  the condition has length > 1 and only the first element will be used

The parameter sep.row is probably not meant for use like this. But it would really help me to be able to fine-tune the table output. Jira might be my itch but there may be other formats that cannot currently created as well. I hope that I did not overlook a solution already present.
In summary:

• the option sep.row would be nice, and
• a new option to change the separator for the first line would be great ;-)

> xfun::session_info('knitr')
R version 4.1.0 (2021-05-18)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19043), RStudio 1.4.1717

Locale:
  LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252 
  LC_CTYPE=English_United Kingdom.1252   
  LC_MONETARY=English_United Kingdom.1252
  LC_NUMERIC=C                           
  LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.1252    

Package version:
  evaluate_0.14   glue_1.4.2      graphics_4.1.0  grDevices_4.1.0
  highr_0.9       knitr_1.33      magrittr_2.0.1  markdown_1.1   
  methods_4.1.0   mime_0.11       stats_4.1.0     stringi_1.6.2  
  stringr_1.4.0   tools_4.1.0     utils_4.1.0     xfun_0.24      
  yaml_2.2.1     

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[yihui]

Thanks for the request! I'm afraid that I won't have time to implement this by myself, but I can probably review a pull request if someone sends one.

[yihui]

This has been implemented in the dev version, thanks to the contribution by @pedropark99.

You can test the development version via

remotes::install_github('yihui/knitr')

Then kable(format = 'jira') should generate the table for you.

Thanks!

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