modify_table_styling: Modify Table Styling

Description

This is a function meant for advanced users to gain more control over the characteristics of the resulting gtsummary table by directly modifying .$table_styling

Usage

modify_table_styling(
  x,
  columns,
  rows = NULL,
  label = NULL,
  spanning_header = NULL,
  hide = NULL,
  footnote = NULL,
  footnote_abbrev = NULL,
  align = NULL,
  missing_symbol = NULL,
  fmt_fun = NULL,
  text_format = NULL,
  undo_text_format = FALSE,
  text_interpret = c("md", "html"),
  cols_merge_pattern = NULL
)

Arguments

x: gtsummary object
columns: vector or selector of columns in x$table_body
rows: predicate expression to select rows in x$table_body. Can be used to style footnote, formatting functions, missing symbols, and text formatting. Default is NULL. See details below.
label: string of column label(s)
spanning_header: string with text for spanning header
hide: logical indicating whether to hide column from output
footnote: string with text for footnote
footnote_abbrev: string with abbreviation definition, e.g. "CI = Confidence Interval"
align: string indicating alignment of column, must be one of c("left", "right", "center")
missing_symbol: string indicating how missing values are formatted.
fmt_fun: function that formats the statistics in the columns/rows in columns= and rows=
text_format: string indicated which type of text formatting to apply to the rows and columns. Must be one of c("bold", "italic", "indent", "indent2"). Do not assign both "indent" and "indent2" to the same cell.
undo_text_format: rarely used. Logical that undoes the indent, bold, and italic styling when TRUE
text_interpret: string, must be one of "md" or "html"
cols_merge_pattern: lifecycle::badge("experimental") glue-syntax string indicating how to merge columns in x$table_body. For example, to construct a confidence interval use "{conf.low}, {conf.high}". The first column listed in the pattern string must match the single column name passed in columns=.

rows argument

The rows argument accepts a predicate expression that is used to specify rows to apply formatting. The expression must evaluate to a logical when evaluated in x$table_body. For example, to apply formatting to the age rows pass rows = variable == "age". A vector of row numbers is NOT acceptable.

A couple of things to note when using the rows= argument.

You can use saved objects to create the predicate argument, e.g. rows = variable == letters[1].
The saved object cannot share a name with a column in x$table_body. The reason for this is that in tbl_merge() the columns are renamed, and the renaming process cannot disambiguate the variable column from an external object named variable in the following expression rows = .data$variable = .env$variable.

cols_merge_pattern argument

There are planned updates to the implementation of column merging. Currently, this function replaces the numeric column with a formatted character column following cols_merge_pattern=. Once gt::cols_merge() gains the rows= argument the implementation will be updated to use it, which will keep numeric columns numeric. For the vast majority of users, the planned change will be go unnoticed.

If this functionality is used in conjunction with tbl_stack() (which includes tbl_uvregression()), there is potential issue with printing. When columns are stack AND when the column-merging is defined with a quosure, you may run into issues due to the loss of the environment when 2 or more quosures are combined. If the expression version of the quosure is the same as the quosure (i.e. no evaluated objects), there should be no issues. Regardless, this argument is used internally with care, and it is not recommended for users.

Details