CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rrstudio
stevec
stevec

Reputation: 52268

Easily view/browse free-text datasets in R/RStudio - alternatives to View() in R/RStudio?

When working with survey data (10-30 columns, 100 - 10k rows, mix of demographic columns like name, age etc, and free-text responses up to nchar == 3000), View() isn't so useful, because it only displays the first 50 or so characters of lengthy strings (we can always widen the column, but this has practical limitations). AFAIK, increasing row height is not possible. So it is not easy to view free text inside RStudio unless it's in the console, which is not necessarily designed for easily browsing through columns of long strings.

Is there any function like View() that displays data similarly but allows for resizing of row heights (to display >1 line of long strings), and perhaps some smarts to allow us to explore list columns in data.frames?

One idea is a function that takes a data.frame argument, writes it as a temp file, and starts a shiny app that displays the data. But something in native R (or built into RStudio) would probably be better than an ad hoc shiny app.

Note: I do know how to achieve this in markdown using kableextra and similar packages that make nice bootstrap tables. However, the goal is to reduce friction between coding in the script pane in RStudio and exploring the data, and I feel like moving code into an Rmd has potential but creates extra friction

Upvotes: 0

Views: 349

Answers (1)

Phil
Phil

Reputation: 8107

DT::datatable() provides the ability to view raw data in tables using all the features of the Javascript DataTables library either in RStudio's viewer tab or separately on the browser of your choice. You can further finetune the display of your data to fit your needs using any of the features provided here: https://rstudio.github.io/DT/

Upvotes: 2

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