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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-22T02:36:06+00:00

I’d like to use write.table except that I want the output to be a

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I’d like to use write.table except that I want the “output” to be a variable in-memory and not a file on disk. Basically I’m trying to get the string representation of a data.frame (with column aligned, no column headers).

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  1. Editorial Team

    I think this works. any critiques? I’m still ramping up on R.

    PrettyPrintDataFrame = function( toPrint , separator = "" , align = "left" )
{        
    leftAlign = FALSE
    if ( align == "left" ) 
    {
        leftAlign = TRUE        
    }
    else if ( align == "right" )  {  }
    else
    {
        stop( "align must be 'left' or 'right'" )
    }

    result = ""
    numberOfColumns = ncol( toPrint )
    columnLenghts = array( dim = numberOfColumns )         
    for ( i in seq( 1:numberOfColumns ) )
    {
        columnLenghts[ i ] = max( nchar( toPrint[ , i ] ) )
    }

    numberOfRows = nrow( toPrint )    
    for ( row in seq( 1:numberOfRows ) )
    {   
        if ( row > 1 )
        {
            result = paste( result , "\n" , sep = "" )
        }

        for ( col in seq( 1:numberOfColumns ) )
        {
            value = toPrint[ row , col ]
            valuePadding = paste( rep( " " , columnLenghts[ col ]- nchar( value ) ) , collapse = "" , sep = "" )

            if ( leftAlign )
            {
                valuePadded = paste( value , valuePadding , sep = "" )
            }
            else
            {
                valuePadded = paste( valuePadding , value , sep = "" )
            }

            if ( col == 1 )
            {
                result = paste( result , valuePadded , sep = "" )
            }
            else            
            {
                result = paste( result , valuePadded , sep = separator )
            }

        }        
    }

    return( result )

}

    test

    df = data.frame( A = c( 500 , 12 , 8 ) , B = c( 1 , 13 , 938 ) , C = c( 92, 754 , 3 ) )
writeLines( PrettyPrintDataFrame( df , " | " ) )
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