Print pretty data.frames/tables to console

Question

Is there a way to print small data.frames to the console in a more readable manner?

For example, would it be possible to output to the console:

Answer 1

If you are also open to printing your output into the (RStudio) viewer pane rather than the console, I would recommend using the DT package.

library(DT)
datatable(iris)

This has several advantages, I think: the output is pretty and well-arranged, the package is able to display large data frames without becoming cumbersome and it is highly customizable to boot.

Answer 2

There are a couple of methods you could try.

1. Add a couple of helper functions to your .Rprofile. In my profile, I have

   hh = function(d) 
      if(class(d)=="matrix"|class(d)=="data.frame") d[1:5,1:5]
   

   This function prints the top left hand corner of the data frame. I also have

   ht = function(d, n=6) rbind(head(d, n), tail(d,n))
   

2. Create your own S3 print function for data frames, e.g.

   print.data.frame = function(x, ..., digits = NULL, 
                           quote = FALSE, right = TRUE, 
                           row.names = TRUE) 
                       message("hi")
   

3. Use a package, e.g. dplyr. However, this is a bit overkill if all you want is pretty printing.

Answer 3

tibbles are printed with colour formatting in the console:

library(tidyverse)

x <- as_tibble(mtcars)
x

Answer 4

In case it helps anyone, I just stumbled across the fact that knitr's kable achieves a nice pretty print. Combine with some of the .Rprofile suggestions above, this seems to achieve what I had in mind.

> knitr::kable(head(iris))

| Sepal.Length| Sepal.Width| Petal.Length| Petal.Width|Species |
|------------:|-----------:|------------:|-----------:|:-------|
|          5.1|         3.5|          1.4|         0.2|setosa  |
|          4.9|         3.0|          1.4|         0.2|setosa  |
|          4.7|         3.2|          1.3|         0.2|setosa  |
|          4.6|         3.1|          1.5|         0.2|setosa  |
|          5.0|         3.6|          1.4|         0.2|setosa  |
|          5.4|         3.9|          1.7|         0.4|setosa  |

Answer 5

I had the same problem recently and came across the huxtable package. It is very flexible and maybe a litte overkill for just nicer console output, but it served me very well.

Here is how you could solve your problem using huxtable:

library(huxtable)
library(magrittr)

small_iris <- iris[1:5, ]

iris_hux <- 
  hux(small_iris) %>% 
  add_colnames() %>% 
  set_bold(row = 1, col = everywhere, value = TRUE) %>% 
  set_all_borders(TRUE)

I think all functions speak for themselves. For a thorough introduction, see https://hughjonesd.github.io/huxtable/huxtable.html#adding-row-and-column-names.

print_screen(iris_hux) yield this output (in the console!):

I have not figured out yet how to suppress the bottom information on the column names. So if someone knows, please comment!

EDIT: In order to suppress the column names at the bottom, use colnames = FALSE inside print_screen().