A generic function. Method are expected to coerce a given object to
lines of human-readable text that can be used, for instance, for
reports. The purpose of toText
is not to store data in a
form that can be read and understood by R; for that, see
dput
or dump
.
The print
method is essentially equivalent to
cat(x, sep = "\n")
.
There is no restriction on encoding, so plain text does not
necessarily mean ASCII. But current methods do not map into
markup-representations.