[R] nice report generator?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 12-02-13 2:27 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 06/02/2012 4:12 PM, Hadley Wickham wrote:
>>>   2. It's more flexible to construct the language object as a language object,
>>>   rather than pasting something together and parsing it.  For one thing, that
>>>   allows non-syntactic variable names; I think it's also easier to read.  So
>>>   your code
>>>
>>>   txt<- paste("tabular(value*v*", LEFT , "~" ,RIGHT ,", data = m_xx,
>>>   suppressLabels  = 2,...)", sep = "")
>>>   eval(parse(text = txt ))
>>>
>>>   could be rewritten as
>>>
>>>   formula<- substitute( value*v*LEFT ~ RIGHT, list(LEFT=LEFT, RIGHT=RIGHT))
>>>   tabular(formula, data = m_xx, suppressLabels = 2, ...)
>>
>> To be strictly correct, shouldn't that be:
>>
>> formula<- eval(substitute( value*v*LEFT ~ RIGHT, list(LEFT=LEFT, RIGHT=RIGHT)))
>>
>> ?
>>
>>>   It might make sense to put something like this into the tables package, but
>>>   I don't want to have a dependency on reshape.
>>
>> Would you consider making tabular generic?
>
> I have now made tabular() into a generic function, but because of the
> problems at R-forge, can't commit the changes immediately.   The old
> tabular() function is now the tabular.formula() method; the default
> method tries to coerce the object to a formula to call that.  I think
> both my suggestion and yours would likely have problems in the new
> system (as they did in the old one) because the environment associated
> with the formula would be wrong.  It's a little tricky, but now
> tabular() works a lot more like model.frame(), which I think has to be
> considered to be the standard way to do this.
>

The new version 0.5.30 with the generic tabular function is now on 
R-forge.  I'll likely push it to CRAN in a couple of days.

Duncan Murdoch