kable produces malformed reference links within lapply function in blogdown - r

Question

I am using blogdown to to create a blogpost that has a series of tables. Creating a single table using the kable function works fine. If you do
blogdown::new_site()
blogdown::new_post("test", ext = ".rmd")
A new rmd file will be created within the content/post directory of the project. If you open that file and create a single table by doing
```{r test1}
library(knitr)
library(magrittr)
library(shiny)
data.frame(a= c(1,2,3)) %>% kable(caption = 'test',format = 'html')
```
A correctly formatted table will be generated. The caption will read "
Table 1: test" If you look at the code of the generated site, the caption will look like this.
<caption>
<span id="tab:test1">Table 1: </span>test
</caption>
Ideally I don't have any desire to label the table as Table 1 in the first place but that is another question. If formatting of captions by kable can be disabled entirely, I'd also be happy.
However if I use lapply to generate 2 tables instead
```{r test2}
lapply(1:2,function(x){
data.frame(a= c(1,2,3)) %>% kable(caption = 'test2',format = 'html') %>% HTML()
}) -> tables
tables[[1]]
tables[[2]]
```
The captions will have the prefix \#tab:test2. If you look at the caption of these tables, you'll see
<caption>(\#tab:test2)test2</caption>
The question is, why kable behaves differently when its called from a lapply compared to its behaviour outside? Note that both of these behaviours are different that its behaviour when simply knitting the file as an html_document.
I did some digging into the kable's code and found that the caption link is created by the knitr:::create_label function. Looking into this function, I saw the part that is responsible for the wrong behaviour seen with the multiple tables.
if (isTRUE(opts_knit$get("bookdown.internal.label"))) {
lab1 = "(\\#"
lab2 = ")"
}
I could not find the code, responsible for the "correct" behaviour with the single table but it seems like knitr internal options are responsible.
Ultimately the behaviour that I want is simply
<caption>test</caption>
which is the behaviour when simply knitting an html document. But I am yet to find a way to set the relevant knitr options and why are they different within the same document.
Edit: Further examination suggests that the issue isn't lapply specific. It can be replicated using a for loop or even { by itself. A complete post with all the problematic examples can be acquired from this issue on knitr's github page. This github repo includes the basic blogdown site that replicates the issue

Answer 1

Turns out the responsible party is not the lapply call but the HTML call at the end. It seems like the regular process by knitr in blogdown and bookdown is to have a temporary marker for the table references in the form of (\#tab:label) and replace it with the appropriate syntax later in the processing.
I was using the HTML call to be able to use the tags object in shiny/htmltools to bind the tables together. This approach seems to make the process of replacing the temporary marker impossible for reasons outside my understanding. For my own purposes I was able to remove the temporary marker all together to get rid of both malformed captions and the working-as-intended table numbers by doing
remove_table_numbers = function(table){
old_attributes = attributes(table)
table %<>% as.character() %>% gsub("\\(\\\\#tab:.*?\\)","",.)
attributes(table) = old_attributes
return(table)
}
data.frame(a= c(1,2,3)) %>% kable(caption = 'test',format = 'html') %>% remove_table_numbers
This question still would benefit from a proper explanation of the reference link placement process and if its possible to apply it to tables in HTML calls as well. But for know this solves my issue. I'll gladly switch the accepted answer if a more complete explanation appears