Question

The formula print method does not respect the environment width option.

For example, given the following long formula:

fo <- y ~ factor1 + factor2 + factor3 + factor4 + factor5 + factor6 + factor7 + factor8

Set the environment width fairly narrow

options(width=30)

And print the formula

print(fo)

Results in (regardless of the width option)

y ~ factor1 + factor2 + factor3 + factor4 + factor5 + factor6 + 
    factor7 + factor8

Any ideas how to make print.formula respect the width option?

Answer 1

I ended up going with a sightly different approach:

print.f <- function(f) { 
  cat(paste(deparse(f, width.cutoff=getOption("width")), collapse="\n")) 
}

It respects the environment’s width setting, while printing the naked (not a string vector) formula with correct indenting.