[R] nice report generator?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 12-02-06 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)))
>
> ?

I think it probably doesn't matter.  The difference is that mine gives a 
pure language object, whereas yours gives a formula object.  The formula 
object has a class which means some methods will work differently, and 
it also has an environment attached, which defines where the variables 
in it should be resolved.  I suspect the variables shouldn't be resolved 
in the environment where "formula" was being created, so it's probably 
better not to attach an environment at all, but the tabular function 
ignores the environment of the formula (it uses its data argument for 
that), so it doesn't make a big difference.

>
>> 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?

Yes, that wouldn't cost much.

Duncan Murdoch