formatDL Format Description Lists

Description

Format vectors of items and their descriptions as 2-column tables or LaTeX-style description lists.

Usage

formatDL(x, y, style = c("table", "list"),
         width = 0.9 * getOption("width"), indent = NULL)

Arguments

x

a vector giving the items to be described, or a list of length 2 or a matrix with 2 columns giving both items and descriptions.

y

a vector of the same length as x with the corresponding descriptions. Only used if x does not already give the descriptions.

style

a character string specifying the rendering style of the description information. Can be abbreviated. If "table", a two-column table with items and descriptions as columns is produced (similar to Texinfo's @table environment). If "list", a LaTeX-style tagged description list is obtained.

width

a positive integer giving the target column for wrapping lines in the output.

indent

a positive integer specifying the indentation of the second column in table style, and the indentation of continuation lines in list style. Must not be greater than width/2, and defaults to width/3 for table style and width/9 for list style.

Details

After extracting the vectors of items and corresponding descriptions from the arguments, both are coerced to character vectors.

In table style, items with more than indent - 3 characters are displayed on a line of their own.

Value

a character vector with the formatted entries.

Examples

## Provide a nice summary of the numerical characteristics of the
## machine R is running on:
writeLines(formatDL(unlist(.Machine)))
## Inspect Sys.getenv() results in "list" style (by default, these are
## printed in "table" style):
writeLines(formatDL(Sys.getenv(), style = "list"))

Copyright (©) 1999–2012 R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
Licensed under the GNU General Public License.