How to create line breaks in knitr::kable() tables with format=“html”?

Question

I would like to include content with line breaks in html tables produced by knitr::kable() . All works well with the default format="markdown" parameter:

> x <- data.frame(a = "No line break", b = "With line<br>break")
> knitr::kable(x)

|a             |b                  |
|:-------------|:------------------|
|No line break |With line<br>break |

The above correctly appears as a line break in the rendered html document.

But with format="html" --which I would prefer to use for other reasons--the <br> tag is converted to <br> and then renders in html as <br> rather than an actual line break. Is there anything I can do to make it behave as it does with the default format="markdown" ?

> knitr::kable(x, format="html")
<table>
 <thead>
  <tr>
   <th style="text-align:left;"> a </th>
   <th style="text-align:left;"> b </th>
  </tr>
 </thead>
<tbody>
  <tr>
   <td style="text-align:left;"> No line break </td>
   <td style="text-align:left;"> With line&lt;br&gt;break </td>
  </tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Answer 1

So after being stuck on this for a long time, I discovered just after posting this that the solution is simply to add escape=FALSE to the example with format="html" .