Escaping LaTeX control symbols in Hmisc::latex

Question

I have a data frame in R which unfortunately has strings in it containing dollar signs. When the function latex() from the package Hmisc converts this data frame to a LaTeX table, the dollar signs are not escaped. This renders the LaTeX uncompilable. Is there a way within Hmisc to escape dollar signs when formatting values from a data frame?

I can't run search and replace over all dollar signs afterwards either, because the Hmisc itself adds dollar signs for the empty cells.

Minimal example:

> latex("test$test",file="")
# returns:
\begin{table}[!tbp]
% [...]
test$test\tabularnewline
% [...]
\end{table}

# should return:
\begin{table}[!tbp]
% [...]
test\$test\tabularnewline
% [...]
\end{table}

Answer 1

You can look at the latexTranslate function, from Hmisc :

R> latexTranslate("3%")
[1] "3\\%"