RMarkdown Knitr Won't Render LaTeX tabular table in pdf - latex

Question

I'm trying to format a table using latex notation in RMarkdown. My code is the following:
\begin{table}[h!]
\center
\begin{tabular}{l|c|c}
\hline
Model & Coefficient & \\
Predictors & Value $ p-value\\
\hline
Intercept & -1.716 & 0.022\\
Retire & 0.197 & 0.020\\
Age & -0.015 & 0.020\\
Health Status & 0.312 & <0.001\\
Income & 0.002 & 0.002\\
Years of Education & 0.114 & <0.001\\
Married & 0.579 & <0.001\\
Hispanic & -0.810 & <0.001\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
For some reason though, when I go to knit the document together, I get the following error:
You may need to add $ $ around a certain inline R expression `r ` in draft.Rmd (see the above hint). See https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/issues/385 for more info.
Error: LaTeX failed to compile draft.tex. See https://yihui.org/tinytex/r/#debugging for debugging tips. See draft.log for more info.
Execution halted
When I remove this chunk, it knits together fine (including other tables I have put together using this method) and I can't figure out what is going on with this code. Any help would be great!

Answer 1

Two problems:
you have one $ instead of a &
it is \centering or \begin{center}...\end{center}, but not \center (this kind of works only by accident)
Furthermore, I suggest you take a look at the siunitx package to get correct minus/< signs and proper alignment of the cells. Also the booktabs package might be worth a look to get a good looking table.
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\begin{table}[h!]
\centering
\begin{tabular}{l|c|c}
\hline
Model & Coefficient & \\
Predictors & Value & p-value\\
\hline
Intercept & -1.716 & 0.022\\
Retire & 0.197 & 0.020\\
Age & -0.015 & 0.020\\
Health Status & 0.312 & <0.001\\
Income & 0.002 & 0.002\\
Years of Education & 0.114 & <0.001\\
Married & 0.579 & <0.001\\
Hispanic & -0.810 & <0.001\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\end{document}