How to rotate a table left margin name with knitr and xtable?

Question

I'm trying to get the results of the table command nicely printed on a pdf by using knitr and xtable.

As a toy example let's say I want to get the table created with

table(c(2,5,5,5,5,7,7,7,7,NA),c(1,5,2,2,2,2,7,7,NA,NA))

I would like to get something like this:

As you can see var1 is rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise.
How can I get it? Similar results, with less or more lines are OK too.

I've being trying different methods I've found.
I've created this Rnw file,

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{rotating}
\begin{document}

<<r table, results='asis', echo=FALSE>>=
library(knitr)
library(xtable)
var1 <- c(2,5,5,5,5,7,7,7,7,NA)
var2 <- c(1,5,2,2,2,2,7,7,NA,NA)

print(xtable(table(var1,var2)))

print.xtableFtable(xtableFtable(ftable(var1,var2), 
       method = "row.compact"))

print.xtableFtable(xtableFtable(ftable(var1,var2), 
       method = "row.compact"), rotate.rownames = TRUE)

print.xtable(xtable(table(var1,var2)), include.rownames=T,include.colnames=T)

@

\end{document}

You can see below the result of the three methods I've tried.

I can't get the expected result.

Any solution with other common package or kable it's OK too.

I guess it could be done with \rotatebox{90} but I don't know how to force xtable to use it nor how to tell xtable to place the left title on the left instead of just being on the top-right.

Answer 1

Here's one possibility. Disclaimer: I am the package author.

library(huxtable) 
var1 <- c(2,5,5,5,5,7,7,7,7,NA)
var2 <- c(1,5,2,2,2,2,7,7,NA,NA)
tbl <- table(var1 = var1, var2 = var2)

ht <- as_hux(tbl)
ht <- cbind(rep('', 4), ht)

ht[2,1] <- 'var1'

ht <- rbind(rep('', 6), ht)
ht[2,2] <- '' # get rid of "rownames"
ht[1,3] <- 'var2'
colspan(ht)[1,3] <- 4
rowspan(ht)[3, 1] <- 3
rotation(ht)[3, 1] <- 90
right_border(ht)[,2] <- 1
bottom_border(ht)[5, -1] <- 1
bottom_border(ht)[2, -1] <- 1
ht

When used in an rmarkdown PDF document, this produces: