pillar (version 1.3.0)

colonnade: Format multiple vectors in a tabular display

Description

The vectors are formatted to fit horizontally into a user-supplied number of characters per row.

The squeeze() function is called by format() and print() and usually doesn't need to be called manually. It returns an object suitable for printing and formatting at a fixed width with additional information about omitted columns.

Usage

colonnade(x, has_row_id = TRUE, width = NULL, ...)

squeeze(x, width = NULL, ...)

Arguments

x

A list of vectors to format. Can contain matrices or data frames. If named, the names will be used as title for the pillars. Non-syntactic names will be escaped.

has_row_id

Include a column indicating row IDs? Pass "*" to mark the row ID column with a star.

width

Default width of the entire output, optional.

...

Ignored

Details

Pillars may be distributed over multiple tiers if width > getOption("width"). In this case each tier is at most getOption("width") characters wide. The very first step of formatting is to determine how many tiers are shown at most, and the width of each tier.

To avoid unnecessary computation for showing very wide colonnades, a first pass tries to fit all capitals into the tiers. For each pillar whose capital fits, it is then decided in which tier it is shown, if at all, and how much horizontal space it may use (either its minimum or its maximum width). Remaining space is then distributed proportionally to pillars that do not use their desired width.

For fitting pillars in one or more tiers, first a check is made if all pillars fit with their maximum width (e.g., option(tibble.width = Inf) or narrow colonnade). If yes, this is the resulting fit, no more work needs to be done. Otherwise, if the maximum width is too wide, the same test is carried out with the minimum width. If this is still too wide, this is the resulting fit. Otherwise, some tiers from the start will contain pillars with their maximum width, and the remaining tiers contain pillars with their minimum width. We determine the cut point where minimum and maximum assignment agree.

Fitting pillars into tiers is very similar to a word-wrapping algorithm. In a loop, new tiers are opened if the current tier overflows. If a column is too wide to fit a single tier, it will never be displayed, and the colonnade will be truncated there. This case should never occur with reasonable display widths larger than 30 characters. Truncation also happens if all available tiers are filled.

The remaining space is distributed from left to right. Each column gains space proportional to the fraction of missing and remaining space, rounded down. Any space remaining after rounding is distributed from left to right, one space per column.

Examples

Run this code
# NOT RUN {
colonnade(list(a = 1:3, b = letters[1:3]))

long_string <- list(paste(letters, collapse = " "))
colonnade(long_string, width = 20)
colonnade(long_string, has_row_id = FALSE, width = 20)

# The width can also be overridden when calling format() or print():
print(colonnade(long_string), width = 20)

# If width is larger than getOption("width"), multiple tiers are created:
colonnade(rep(long_string, 4), width = Inf)
squeeze(colonnade(long_string), width = 20)
# }

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