Printing vectors nicely in tibbles

You can get basic control over how a vector is printed in a tibble by providing a format() method. If you want greater control, you need to understand how printing works. The presentation of a column in a tibble is controlled by two S3 generics:

vctrs::vec_ptype_abbr() determines what goes into the column header.
pillar::pillar_shaft() determines what goes into the body, or the shaft, of the column.

Technically a pillar is composed of a shaft (decorated with an ornament), with a capital above and a base below. Multiple pillars form a colonnade, which can be stacked in multiple tiers. This is the motivation behind the names in our API.

This short vignette shows the basics of column styling using a "latlon" vector. The vignette imagines the code is in a package, so that you can see the roxygen2 commands you’ll need to create documentation and the NAMESPACE file. In this vignette, we’ll attach pillar and vctrs:

library(vctrs)
library(pillar)

You don’t need to do this in a package. Instead, you’ll need to import the packages by then to the Imports: section of your DESCRIPTION. The following helper does this for you:

usethis::use_package("vctrs")
usethis::use_package("pillar")

Prerequisites

To illustrate the basic ideas we’re going to create a "latlon" class that encodes geographic coordinates in a record. We’ll pretend that this code lives in a package called earth. For simplicity, the values are printed as degrees and minutes only. By using vctrs_rcrd(), we already get the infrastructure to make this class fully compatible with data frames for free. See vignette("s3-vector", package = "vctrs") for details on the record data type.

#' @export
latlon <- function(lat, lon) {
  new_rcrd(list(lat = lat, lon = lon), class = "earth_latlon")
}

#' @export
format.earth_latlon <- function(x, ..., formatter = deg_min) {
  x_valid <- which(!is.na(x))

  lat <- field(x, "lat")[x_valid]
  lon <- field(x, "lon")[x_valid]

  ret <- rep(NA_character_, vec_size(x))
  ret[x_valid] <- paste0(formatter(lat, "lat"), " ", formatter(lon, "lon"))
  # It's important to keep NA in the vector!
  ret
}

deg_min <- function(x, direction) {
  pm <- if (direction == "lat") c("N", "S") else c("E", "W")

  sign <- sign(x)
  x <- abs(x)
  deg <- trunc(x)
  x <- x - deg
  min <- round(x * 60)

  # Ensure the columns are always the same width so they line up nicely
  ret <- sprintf("%d°%.2d'%s", deg, min, ifelse(sign >= 0, pm[[1]], pm[[2]]))
  format(ret, justify = "right")
}

latlon(c(32.71, 2.95), c(-117.17, 1.67))
#> <earth_latlon[2]>
#> [1] 32°43'N 117°10'W  2°57'N   1°40'E

Using in a tibble

Columns of this class can be used in a tibble right away because we’ve made a class using the vctrs infrastructure and have provided a format() method:

library(tibble)
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'tibble'
#> The following object is masked from 'package:vctrs':
#> 
#>     data_frame

loc <- latlon(
  c(28.3411783, 32.7102978, 30.2622356, 37.7859102, 28.5, NA),
  c(-81.5480348, -117.1704058, -97.7403327, -122.4131357, -81.4, NA)
)

data <- tibble(venue = "rstudio::conf", year = 2017:2022, loc = loc)

data
#> # A tibble: 6 × 3
#>   venue          year              loc
#>   <chr>         <int>       <erth_ltl>
#> 1 rstudio::conf  2017 28°20'N  81°33'W
#> 2 rstudio::conf  2018 32°43'N 117°10'W
#> 3 rstudio::conf  2019 30°16'N  97°44'W
#> 4 rstudio::conf  2020 37°47'N 122°25'W
#> 5 rstudio::conf  2021 28°30'N  81°24'W
#> 6 rstudio::conf  2022               NA

This output is ok, but we could improve it by:

Using a more description type abbreviation than <erth_ltl>.
Using a dash of colour to highlight the most important parts of the value.
Providing a narrower view when horizontal space is at a premium.

The following sections show how to enhance the rendering.

Fixing the data type

Instead of <erth_ltl> we’d prefer to use <latlon>. We can do that by implementing the vec_ptype_abbr() method, which should return a string that can be used in a column header. For your own classes, strive for an evocative abbreviation that’s under 6 characters.

#' @export
vec_ptype_abbr.earth_latlon <- function(x) {
  "latlon"
}

data
#> # A tibble: 6 × 3
#>   venue          year              loc
#>   <chr>         <int>         <latlon>
#> 1 rstudio::conf  2017 28°20'N  81°33'W
#> 2 rstudio::conf  2018 32°43'N 117°10'W
#> 3 rstudio::conf  2019 30°16'N  97°44'W
#> 4 rstudio::conf  2020 37°47'N 122°25'W
#> 5 rstudio::conf  2021 28°30'N  81°24'W
#> 6 rstudio::conf  2022               NA

Custom rendering

The format() method is used by default for rendering. For custom formatting you need to implement the pillar_shaft() method. This function should always return a pillar shaft object, created by new_pillar_shaft_simple() or similar. new_pillar_shaft_simple() accepts ANSI escape codes for colouring, and pillar includes some built in styles like style_subtle(). We can use subtle style for the degree and minute separators to make the data more obvious.

First we define a degree formatter that makes use of style_subtle():

deg_min_color <- function(x, direction) {
  pm <- if (direction == "lat") c("N", "S") else c("E", "W")

  sign <- sign(x)
  x <- abs(x)
  deg <- trunc(x)
  x <- x - deg
  rad <- round(x * 60)
  ret <- sprintf(
    "%d%s%.2d%s%s",
    deg,
    pillar::style_subtle("°"),
    rad,
    pillar::style_subtle("'"),
    pm[ifelse(sign >= 0, 1, 2)]
  )
  format(ret, justify = "right")
}

And then we pass that to our format() method:

#' @importFrom pillar pillar_shaft
#' @export
pillar_shaft.earth_latlon <- function(x, ...) {
  out <- format(x, formatter = deg_min_color)
  pillar::new_pillar_shaft_simple(out, align = "right")
}

Currently, ANSI escapes are not rendered in vignettes, so this result doesn’t look any different, but if you run the code yourself you’ll see an improved display.

data
#> # A tibble: 6 × 3
#>   venue          year              loc
#>   <chr>         <int>         <latlon>
#> 1 rstudio::conf  2017 28°20'N  81°33'W
#> 2 rstudio::conf  2018 32°43'N 117°10'W
#> 3 rstudio::conf  2019 30°16'N  97°44'W
#> 4 rstudio::conf  2020 37°47'N 122°25'W
#> 5 rstudio::conf  2021 28°30'N  81°24'W
#> 6 rstudio::conf  2022               NA

As well as the functions in pillar, the cli package provides a variety of tools for styling text.

Truncation

Tibbles can automatically compacts columns when there’s no enough horizontal space to display everything:

print(data, width = 30)
#> # A tibble: 6 × 3
#>   venue  year              loc
#>   <chr> <int>         <latlon>
#> 1 rstu…  2017 28°20'N  81°33'W
#> 2 rstu…  2018 32°43'N 117°10'W
#> 3 rstu…  2019 30°16'N  97°44'W
#> 4 rstu…  2020 37°47'N 122°25'W
#> 5 rstu…  2021 28°30'N  81°24'W
#> 6 rstu…  2022               NA

Currently the latlon class isn’t ever compacted because we haven’t specified a minimum width when constructing the shaft. Let’s fix that and re-print the data:

#' @importFrom pillar pillar_shaft
#' @export
pillar_shaft.earth_latlon <- function(x, ...) {
  out <- format(x)
  pillar::new_pillar_shaft_simple(out, align = "right", min_width = 10)
}

print(data, width = 30)
#> # A tibble: 6 × 3
#>   venue        year        loc
#>   <chr>       <int>   <latlon>
#> 1 rstudio::c…  2017 28°20'N  …
#> 2 rstudio::c…  2018 32°43'N 1…
#> 3 rstudio::c…  2019 30°16'N  …
#> 4 rstudio::c…  2020 37°47'N 1…
#> 5 rstudio::c…  2021 28°30'N  …
#> 6 rstudio::c…  2022         NA

Adaptive rendering

Truncation may be useful for character data, but for lat-lon data it’d be nicer to show full degrees and remove the minutes. We’ll first write a function that does this:

deg <- function(x, direction) {
  pm <- if (direction == "lat") c("N", "S") else c("E", "W")

  sign <- sign(x)
  x <- abs(x)
  deg <- round(x)

  ret <- sprintf("%d°%s", deg, pm[ifelse(sign >= 0, 1, 2)])
  format(ret, justify = "right")
}

Then use it as part of more sophisticated implementation of the pillar_shaft() method:

#' @importFrom pillar pillar_shaft
#' @export
pillar_shaft.earth_latlon <- function(x, ...) {
  deg <- format(x, formatter = deg)
  deg_min <- format(x)

  pillar::new_pillar_shaft(
    list(deg = deg, deg_min = deg_min),
    width = pillar::get_max_extent(deg_min),
    min_width = pillar::get_max_extent(deg),
    class = "pillar_shaft_latlon"
  )
}

Now the pillar_shaft() method returns an object of class "pillar_shaft_latlon" created by new_pillar_shaft(). This object contains the necessary information to render the values, and also minimum and maximum width values. For simplicity, both formats are pre-rendered, and the minimum and maximum widths are computed from there. (get_max_extent() is a helper that computes the maximum display width occupied by the values in a character vector.)

All that’s left to do is to implement a format() method for our new "pillar_shaft_latlon" class. This method will be called with a width argument, which then determines which of the formats to choose. The formatting of our choice is passed to the new_ornament() function:

#' @export
format.pillar_shaft_latlon <- function(x, width, ...) {
  if (get_max_extent(x$deg_min) <= width) {
    ornament <- x$deg_min
  } else {
    ornament <- x$deg
  }

  pillar::new_ornament(ornament, align = "right")
}

data
#> # A tibble: 6 × 3
#>   venue          year              loc
#>   <chr>         <int>         <latlon>
#> 1 rstudio::conf  2017 28°20'N  81°33'W
#> 2 rstudio::conf  2018 32°43'N 117°10'W
#> 3 rstudio::conf  2019 30°16'N  97°44'W
#> 4 rstudio::conf  2020 37°47'N 122°25'W
#> 5 rstudio::conf  2021 28°30'N  81°24'W
#> 6 rstudio::conf  2022               NA
print(data, width = 30)
#> # A tibble: 6 × 3
#>   venue        year        loc
#>   <chr>       <int>   <latlon>
#> 1 rstudio::c…  2017 28°N  82°W
#> 2 rstudio::c…  2018 33°N 117°W
#> 3 rstudio::c…  2019 30°N  98°W
#> 4 rstudio::c…  2020 38°N 122°W
#> 5 rstudio::c…  2021 28°N  81°W
#> 6 rstudio::c…  2022         NA

Testing

If you want to test the output of your code, you can compare it with a known state recorded in a text file. The testthat::expect_snapshot() function offers an easy way to test output-generating functions. It takes care about details such as Unicode, ANSI escapes, and output width. Furthermore it won’t make the tests fail on CRAN. This is important because your output may rely on details out of your control, which should be fixed eventually but should not lead to your package being removed from CRAN.

Use this testthat expectation in one of your test files to create a snapshot test:

expect_snapshot(pillar_shaft(data$loc))

See https://testthat.r-lib.org/articles/snapshotting.html for more information.