Reputation: 3274

Print pretty data.frames/tables to console

Is there a way to print small data.frames to the console in a more readable manner?

For example, would it be possible to output to the console:

library(MASS)   
iris[1:5, ]

  Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa
2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa
3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2  setosa
4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2  setosa
5          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2  setosa

iris[1:5, ]

  +--------------+-------------+--------------+-------------+---------+
  | Sepal.Length | Sepal.Width | Petal.Length | Petal.Width | Species |
  +--------------+-------------+--------------+-------------+---------+
1 |          5.1 |         3.5 |          1.4 |         0.2 |  setosa |
2 |          4.9 |         3.0 |          1.4 |         0.2 |  setosa |
3 |          4.7 |         3.2 |          1.3 |         0.2 |  setosa |
4 |          4.6 |         3.1 |          1.5 |         0.2 |  setosa |
5 |          5.0 |         3.6 |          1.4 |         0.2 |  setosa |
  +--------------+-------------+--------------+-------------+---------+

I realise for large data.frames it would take up an unnecessary amount of time, but if it's an option, I would like to be able to look at small frames in a more structured manner.

In particular, when I have two text fields next to each other, it would be much easier with a pipe between the two fields to separate them, as the spacing between words is the same size as the spacing between columns.

Thanks

Upvotes: 30

Answers (6)

Mike

Reputation: 821

How about a third party cli app for viewing datasets? Visidata outside the console? It's scrollable and does pretty well with larger datasets as well.

You might work up a helper function to write a dataframe to a temp file. Something possibly like:

df2temp <- func(.df) {
  write.csv(.df, "temp.csv", row.names=FALSE)
}

You could then do something like:

df2temp(some_dataframe)

and use Visidata to view temp.csv in another terminal window/tab/pane (check out tmux if you don't use it):

vd temp.csv

Upvotes: 0

zx8754

Reputation: 56004

tibbles are printed with colour formatting in the console:

library(tidyverse)

x <- as_tibble(mtcars)
x

Upvotes: 2

tifu

Reputation: 1411

If you are also open to printing your output into the (RStudio) viewer pane rather than the console, I would recommend using the DT package.

library(DT)
datatable(iris)

This has several advantages, I think: the output is pretty and well-arranged, the package is able to display large data frames without becoming cumbersome and it is highly customizable to boot.

Upvotes: 2

der_grund

Reputation: 1938

I had the same problem recently and came across the huxtable package. It is very flexible and maybe a litte overkill for just nicer console output, but it served me very well.

Here is how you could solve your problem using huxtable:

library(huxtable)
library(magrittr)

small_iris <- iris[1:5, ]

iris_hux <- 
  hux(small_iris) %>% 
  add_colnames() %>% 
  set_bold(row = 1, col = everywhere, value = TRUE) %>% 
  set_all_borders(TRUE)

I think all functions speak for themselves. For a thorough introduction, see https://hughjonesd.github.io/huxtable/huxtable.html#adding-row-and-column-names.

print_screen(iris_hux) yield this output (in the console!):

I have not figured out yet how to suppress the bottom information on the column names. So if someone knows, please comment!

EDIT: In order to suppress the column names at the bottom, use colnames = FALSE inside print_screen().

Upvotes: 13

Akhil Nair

Reputation: 3274

In case it helps anyone, I just stumbled across the fact that knitr's kable achieves a nice pretty print. Combine with some of the .Rprofile suggestions above, this seems to achieve what I had in mind.

> knitr::kable(head(iris))

| Sepal.Length| Sepal.Width| Petal.Length| Petal.Width|Species |
|------------:|-----------:|------------:|-----------:|:-------|
|          5.1|         3.5|          1.4|         0.2|setosa  |
|          4.9|         3.0|          1.4|         0.2|setosa  |
|          4.7|         3.2|          1.3|         0.2|setosa  |
|          4.6|         3.1|          1.5|         0.2|setosa  |
|          5.0|         3.6|          1.4|         0.2|setosa  |
|          5.4|         3.9|          1.7|         0.4|setosa  |

Upvotes: 35

csgillespie

Reputation: 60452

There are a couple of methods you could try.

Add a couple of helper functions to your .Rprofile. In my profile, I have
```
hh = function(d) 
   if(class(d)=="matrix"|class(d)=="data.frame") d[1:5,1:5]
```
This function prints the top left hand corner of the data frame. I also have
```
ht = function(d, n=6) rbind(head(d, n), tail(d,n))
```

Create your own S3 print function for data frames, e.g.

print.data.frame = function(x, ..., digits = NULL, 
                        quote = FALSE, right = TRUE, 
                        row.names = TRUE) 
                    message("hi")

Use a package, e.g. dplyr. However, this is a bit overkill if all you want is pretty printing.

Upvotes: 3

Print pretty data.frames/tables to console

Answers (6)

Related Questions