[R] Align columns in data frame write.table

[sharx]

Does anyone know of a way to specify the alignment of individual columns in a
data frame so that after using write.table the columns are aligned in the
file?



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[Joshua Wiley]

I do not know of any option in write.table() that would allow a
variable spacer, such as padding with spaces to make columns centered
or right aligned. Everything is just separated somehow. You could
look at ?format or ?sprintf which have padding/alignment options.
Once you had properly padded character data, you could just use
writeLines() to push it to a file.

Cheers,

Josh

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Joshua Wiley
Ph.D. Student, Health Psychology
Programmer Analyst II, Statistical Consulting Group
University of California, Los Angeles
https://joshuawiley.com/

[David Winsemius]

On Aug 10, 2012, at 6:39 PM, sharx wrote:

> Does anyone know of a way to specify the alignment of individual
> columns in a
> data frame so that after using write.table the columns are aligned
> in the
> file?

Do you mean by padding with spaces? set numzer.pad to the desired
width and then perhaps using

lapply(dfrm, function(x) sprintf(paste('%0', numzer.pad, 'i', sep=''),
x)

You might need to check for the class of the columns because the
letter in the format string for sprintf is different fo numbers and
characters.

--

David Winsemius, MD
Alameda, CA, USA

[arun]

HI,

Not sure how you want to align the columns.

If you want to write the columns in fixed width format, you can use,
write.fwf() from library(gdata).

A.K.