CODEWITHSUNDEEP
latexknitrxtablemath-mode
wolfste4
wolfste4

Reputation: 39

xtable with latex math symbols in the table

I'm trying to write this table with checkboxes using the xtable package. It would seem that the checkboxes that I've chosen are what is throwing the error. I'm just at a loss how to fix it. 

library(xtable)

## I want to create a table with the names of some people in two columns
nStu = 10

## Create fake names
names = character(nStu)
for(i in 1:nStu){
  names[i] = paste(LETTERS[i],rep(letters[i],5),sep='',collapse='')
}
## put check boxes behind each of the names
squares = rep('$ \\square $',nStu)

## Build the table
rosterTab = data.frame('Name'=names,'Mostly'=squares,'Sometimes'=squares, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

## Now chop it in half and paste the halves together.  (Yes, if nStu is odd, this will have to be fixed)
lTab = nStu%/%2
aTab = rosterTab[1:lTab, ]
bTab = rosterTab[(lTab+1):nStu, ]
outTab = cbind(aTab,bTab)

## Everything before this point runs fine.
outTab.tab = xtable(outTab,label=FALSE)
align(outTab.tab) = 'llcc||lcc'
print(outTab.tab, include.rownames=FALSE, sanitize.text.function = function(x){x})

The error message that I'm getting is:

Error in as.string(y) : Cannot coerce argument to a string

This error goes away if I use:

squares = rep('aaa',nStu)

Ideally, I want to get the names from a csv file (which I can do quite easily), and will use knitr to write this into a LaTeX document. (I want to do this for a bunch of input files, so automating this task seems useful to me.)

Here are some other ideas that I've considered:

  1. A $\LaTeX$ only solution. Note, that there is one other difficulty (other than the squares not being in the input file), and that is that I would need to do some text manipulation on the strings in the input file.
  2. Replacing the \square symbol with some other object that looks like a checkbox, that (through knitr) I can send to $\LaTeX$.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 523

Answers (0)

Related Questions