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"))