Rotate table pdf output from Markdown - r

Question

I want to rotate table output by 90 degrees on pdf. I am using markdown to generate a report and kable to display the tables in a loop. If possible, I would like to continue using kable since there are lot of other things which are dependent on it that I haven't included in this MWE.
This is a simple example using iris dataset. I tried using landscape function from this post Rotate a table from R markdown in pdf
---
output: pdf_document
header-includes:
\usepackage{lscape}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
---
```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = FALSE)
```
Report page -
```{r results='asis'}
library(knitr)
library(kableExtra)
for (i in 1:3) {
print(landscape(kable_styling(
kable(iris[i:(i+5), ], format = "latex", align = "c", booktabs = TRUE,
longtable = TRUE, row.names = FALSE), latex_options = c("striped"), full_width = T)))
}
```
But this only rotates the page number keeping the table as it is.
I am actually looking for a solution which provides me the output in this way -
To clarify, all the pages with table data in it (3 for this example) should be rotated whereas rest of them should remain as it is. Also, I need longtable = TRUE in kable since in my actual example I am printing lot of rows.

Answer 1

Use package rotating
I added a simple example for you.
---
title: "test"
header-includes: \usepackage[figuresright]{rotating}
#or \usepackage[figuresleft]{rotating}
output:
pdf_document:
latex_engine: xelatex
---
```{r setup, include = FALSE}
library(flextable)
ft <- flextable(head(mtcars))
```
\begin{sidewaysfigure}
`r ft`
\end{sidewaysfigure}
```
Further you can modify it for your tasks ;)

Answer 2

I found another way using rotatebox.
---
output: pdf_document
header-includes:
\usepackage{lscape}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage[figuresright]{rotating}
---
```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = FALSE)
```
Report page -
```{r results='asis', warning=FALSE, message=FALSE}
library(knitr)
library(kableExtra)
for (i in 1:3) {
cat('\\rotatebox{90}{')
print(kable(iris[i:(i+5), ], format = "latex", align = "c", booktabs = TRUE,
row.names = FALSE))
cat('}')
cat("\n\\newpage\n")
}
```