BUG: Underscores aren't escaped in LaTeX outputs

[gtkacz]

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• I have confirmed this bug exists on the main branch of pandas.

Reproducible Example

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame([{"header_1": 1, "header_2": 2}, {"header_1": 3, "header_2": 4}])
print(df.to_latex(index=False))

Issue Description

Underlines in strings ( _ ) should be escaped in LaTeX outputs given than underscores in LaTeX represent subscripts.

Expected Behavior

The expected output of the provided code example should be:

\begin{tabular}{rr}
\toprule
header\_1 & header\_2 \\
\midrule
1 & 2 \\
3 & 4 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}

But instead is:

\begin{tabular}{rr}
\toprule
header_1 & header_2 \\
\midrule
1 & 2 \\
3 & 4 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}

Installed Versions

INSTALLED VERSIONS

commit : 0691c5c
python : 3.12.7
python-bits : 64
OS : Linux
OS-release : 5.15.167.4-microsoft-standard-WSL2
Version : #1 SMP Tue Nov 5 00:21:55 UTC 2024
machine : x86_64
processor : x86_64
byteorder : little
LC_ALL : None
LANG : C.UTF-8
LOCALE : C.UTF-8

pandas : 2.2.3
numpy : 2.2.4
pytz : 2025.2
dateutil : 2.9.0.post0
pip : None
Cython : None
sphinx : None
IPython : 9.1.0
adbc-driver-postgresql: None
adbc-driver-sqlite : None
bs4 : 4.13.4
blosc : None
bottleneck : None
dataframe-api-compat : None
fastparquet : None
fsspec : 2024.12.0
html5lib : None
hypothesis : None
gcsfs : None
jinja2 : 3.1.6
lxml.etree : None
matplotlib : 3.10.1
numba : None
numexpr : None
odfpy : None
openpyxl : None
pandas_gbq : None
psycopg2 : None
pymysql : None
pyarrow : 19.0.1
pyreadstat : None
pytest : None
python-calamine : None
pyxlsb : None
s3fs : None
scipy : 1.15.2
sqlalchemy : None
tables : None
tabulate : 0.9.0
xarray : None
xlrd : None
xlsxwriter : None
zstandard : None
tzdata : 2025.2
qtpy : None
pyqt5 : None

[gtkacz]

I found the escape bool keyword on the to_latex method, which fixes this. This should be enabled by default though.