Question

I would like to save a table as a figure (using “tableGrob” from gridExtra package). This works without any problem.

But before doing that, I need to add the “%” symbol at all the values in the table. However, pasting the symbol to the table transforms the table into a vector.

my.table <- table(diamonds$cut, diamonds$color)

str(my.table)
'table' int [1:5, 1:7] 163 662 1513 1603 2834 224 933 2400 2337 3903 ...
- attr(*, "dimnames")=List of 2
..$ : chr [1:5] "Fair" "Good" "Very Good" "Premium" ...
..$ : chr [1:7] "D" "E" "F" "G" ...

my.table <- format(100*my.table, 2)

          D        E        F        G        H        I        J      
Fair      "16300"  "22400"  "31200"  "31400"  "30300"  "17500"  "11900"
Good      "66200"  "93300"  "90900"  "87100"  "70200"  "52200"  "30700"
Very Good "151300" "240000" "216400" "229900" "182400" "120400" "67800"
Premium   "160300" "233700" "233100" "292400" "236000" "142800" "80800"
Ideal     "283400" "390300" "382600" "488400" "311500" "209300" "89600"

Still ok , but the next command destroys the table :

my.table <- paste(my.table, '%')
str(my.table)
"character"

Would you know a way to circumvent this?

Answer 1

One thing you could do is simply rebuild the table:

m <- paste(my.table, '%')
matrix(m,5,7,dimnames = dimnames(my.table))

But if, as seems likely, this table is headed towards being output in LaTeX (or something similar) it might make more sense to add the % symbol when converting it to whatever markup language you’re using, rather then within the data structure in R.