Question

When I parse web sites in R, (system: R+debian) the html object output in the console make me uncomfortable.

The gap is wide between lines. How can I make it normal, to narrow the gap between the lines?

Maybe you can see tha same output with the following code.

options(encoding="gbk")
library(XML)
baseURL <- "http://www.jb51.net/article/27174.htm"
txt <- readLines(baseURL)
txt

Answer 1

Interesting, it seems that when print-ing a vector, the longest element decides how all elements will be spaced.

Your longest string is txt[374]: on my screen, it takes 19 lines; that means every element of txt will be printed using 19 lines, with possibly a lot of white space.

You don’t have that problem when printing a list, so a solution is to do:

print(as.list(txt))