[R] Printing left-justified character strings

[David L Carlson]

I think the OP does not realize that head() and tail() do not print anything. They extract the first or last values/rows and if they are not assigned to an object, they automatically go to print(). 

Redefining print.data.frame would also fix that problem.

David L. Carlson
Department of Anthropology
Texas A&M University

-----Original Message-----
From: R-help [mailto:r-help-bounces using r-project.org] On Behalf Of Duncan Murdoch
Sent: Tuesday, June 5, 2018 11:40 AM
To: zListserv <zlistserv using gmail.com>; r-help using r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] Printing left-justified character strings

On 05/06/2018 10:24 AM, zListserv wrote:
> Many (most?) R functions print character strings and factor labels right-justified.

Could you be more specific?  I see character strings left justified, 
e.g. x <- rep(c("a", "ab", "abc"), 7) prints as

   [1] "a"   "ab"  "abc" "a"   "ab"  "abc" "a"
   [8] "ab"  "abc" "a"   "ab"  "abc" "a"   "ab"
  [15] "abc" "a"   "ab"  "abc" "a"   "ab"  "abc"

In a data frame, I do see it right justified:

      x
1    a
2   ab
3  abc
etc.

It is easy to change the printing of data frames:

print.data.frame <- function(x, ..., right = FALSE) {
   base::print.data.frame(x, ..., right = right)
}

 > data.frame(x)
    x
1  a
2  ab
3  abc

Are there other examples you're seeing?

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> print accepts right=FALSE to print character strings left-justified, but neither head nor tail seem to do so, and even print is a little inconsistent depending on whether it's done while knitting.
> 
> Is there a way to set left-justification globally so every routine will print character strings left-justified?
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