[R] Printing to screen a matrix or data.frame in one chunk (not splitting columns)

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "AC" == Adrián Cortés <adrcort at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Fri, 15 May 2009 08:58:04 -0700 writes:

    AC> Hello,
    AC> I saw this nice trick I want to replicate but I lost the source and I hope
    AC> one of you can point me to the solution.  My problem is that I don't know
    AC> the correct words to query this.

    AC> When I print to screen a matrix or data.frame the columns are split and
    AC> printed below the previous ones; even though I have plenty of screen left.

    AC> E.g.,

    >> my_matrix = matrix(runif(30),nrow=3,ncol=10)
    >> my_matrix
    AC> [,1]      [,2]      [,3]       [,4]      [,5]      [,6]
    AC> [,7]
    AC> [1,] 0.4979305 0.1155717 0.4484069 0.29986049 0.5427566 0.4324351
    AC> 0.269171456
    AC> [2,] 0.8405987 0.3605237 0.6615507 0.75305248 0.8569482 0.3401004
    AC> 0.192526423
    AC> [3,] 0.5608779 0.3953941 0.9995035 0.03141064 0.7985053 0.4903582
    AC> 0.000490054
    AC> [,8]      [,9]      [,10]
    AC> [1,] 0.1402751 0.2852381 0.98816751
    AC> [2,] 0.8337806 0.7322920 0.17505541
    AC> [3,] 0.5414113 0.4668012 0.04420137

    AC> So there is a way to resize the space for printing so that everything in
    AC> printed in one chunk.

options(width = 100) # or whatever.

---

For ESS users, 
this option is set to the "correct" value, when R is started.
If later, the emacs window is resized,
you can automatically set the width to the current buffer
("window") size, by

   M-x ess-execute-screen-options

or, for everyone here who has

  (add-hook 'ess-mode-hook	  'ess-add-MM-keys)
  (add-hook 'inferior-ess-mode-hook 'ess-add-MM-keys)

in their ~/.emacs equivalent, it's a simple  
"C-c w" ('w' for 'width') to adapt the R option to the emacs
window size.

Martin Maechler, 
ETH Zurich