R markdown table with a caption - r

Question

I'm trying to create a table outside of a code chunk using normal markdown notation and to add a caption to it. Here's an example file (taken from here:
---
output: pdf_document
---
| First Header | Second Header | Third Header |
| :------------ | :-----------: | -------------------: |
| First row | Data | Very long data entry |
| Second row | **Cell** | *Cell* |
| Third row | Cell that spans across two columns ||
[Table caption, works as a reference][section-mmd-tables-table1]
This unfortunately produces a rather sad string:
Removing the caption line in square brackets produces the table fine (but without the caption, obviously):
This can be achieved if I made my data into an actual data.frame and used kable as shown here but I'm looking to avoid having to do this.

Answer 1

The linked guide refers to MultiMarkdown, while RMarkdown uses Pandocs. Captions work a little bit differently in Pandoc. The following should do the trick. The syntax is Table: followed by your caption; Pandocs numbers automatically. Leave one line blank between the end of the table and the caption line.
---
output: pdf_document
---
| First Header | Second Header | Third Header |
| :------------ | :-----------: | -------------------: |
| First row | Data | Very long data entry |
| Second row | **Cell** | *Cell* |
| Third row | Cell that spans across two columns ||
Table: Your Caption