base (version 3.3)

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.

Value

a character vector with the formatted entries.

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.

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"))