jQuery DataTables

We can use the JavaScript library DataTables to generate enhanced tables in HTML. In the example below, we create a table for the mtcars data:

library(knitr)
kable(mtcars, "html", table.attr = "id=\"mtcars_table\"")

Note we assigned an id to the table, and next we use the DataTables library to tweak the table.

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function() {
        $('#mtcars_table').DataTable();
    } );
</script>

Since this is a Markdown vignette, we need to add the JavaScript libraries as well as some additional CSS files to the HTML header, and this can be done via:

options(markdown.HTML.header = system.file("misc", "datatables.html", package = "knitr"))

The file datatables.html under the misc directory of knitr was added to the HTML output.

By comparison, below is an ordinary table:

kable(head(mtcars), "html")

This vignette is only a toy example. I'd recommend you to use the DT package instead: https://github.com/rstudio/DT