[R] Suggestions for hierarchical row names?

[Kevin Zembower]

Hello,

On 28 June I asked a question with the subject "Processing a 
hierarchical string name". Folks here were very generous in helping me, 
and I'm very pleased with the solutions. Now, I'm asking about a related 
topic, and I have both technical and stylistic questions.

I'm still working on my US census report for my neighborhood, and have 
tables with labels like this:

 > p16_tab[,1]
# A tibble: 9 × 1
   label 

   <chr> 

1 " !!Total:" 

2 " !!Total:!!Family households:" 

3 " !!Total:!!Family households:!!Married couple family" 

4 " !!Total:!!Family households:!!Other family:" 

5 " !!Total:!!Family households:!!Other family:!!Male householder, no 
spouse present"
6 " !!Total:!!Family households:!!Other family:!!Female householder, no 
spouse present"
7 " !!Total:!!Nonfamily households:" 

8 " !!Total:!!Nonfamily households:!!Householder living alone" 

9 " !!Total:!!Nonfamily households:!!Householder not living alone" 

 >

A sample table can be obtained with:
library(tidyverse)
library(tidycensus)

get_us <- function(table, summary_var) {
     get_decennial(
         geography = "us",
         table = table,
         cache_table = TRUE,
         year = 2020,
         sumfile = "dhc",
         summary_var = summary_var) %>%
         mutate(GEOID = NULL,
                NAME = NULL,
                "US_pc" = value / summary_value * 100,
                value = NULL,
                summary_value = NULL)

tableID <- "P16"
summary_var <- "P16_001N"

(us_P16 <- get_us(tableID, summary_var))

labels <- load_variables(2020, "dhc", cache = TRUE)

(p16_tab <- us_P16 %>%
      left_join(labels, by = c("variable" = "name")) %>%
      mutate(variable = NULL, concept = NULL) %>%
      relocate(label)
)

Initially, I thought that I would indent the lines by a single space for 
every piece of text starting with "!!" and ending with ":" except for 
the last one. This works fine, if the final output was just ASCII text.

However, I'm trying to output my report in LaTeX, using sweave and 
knitr/kable. When I output my report using spaces, LaTeX deletes them. I 
then tried replacing the spaces with "\hspace{1em}":

p16_tab$label <- p16_tab$label %>%
     str_replace("^ !!", "") %>% #Drop the leading ' !!'
     str_replace_all("[^!]*!!", "\\\\hspace{1em}")

kable(p16_tab, format = "latex", booktabs = TRUE,
       col.names = c("label", "United States %-age")
       )

This results in the "\" of "\hspace" being replace with 
"\textbackslash{}hspace".

I also thought that there was a way to suppress formatting in 
kableExtra, but I can't find it now. Regardless, I remember it didn't 
work the way I wanted it to, either.

kableExtra has the add_indent() function, that looks promising:

(p16_tab <- us_P16 %>%
      left_join(labels, by = c("variable" = "name")) %>%
      mutate(variable = NULL, concept = NULL) %>%
      relocate(label)
)

p16_tab$label <- p16_tab$label %>%
     str_replace("^ !!", "") %>% #Drop the leading ' !!'
     str_replace_all("[^!]*!!", "") #Replace each !!.* with nothing

Unfortunately, this doesn't work:

kable(p16_tab, format = "latex", booktabs = TRUE,
       col.names = c("label", "United States %-age")
       ) %>%
       add_indent(c(2:9), level_of_indent = c(1,2,2,3,3,1,2,2))

and I have to do this:

kable(p16_tab, format = "latex", booktabs = TRUE,
       col.names = c("label", "United States %-age")
       ) %>%
     add_indent(c(2,7), level_of_indent = 1) %>%
     add_indent(c(3,4,8,9), level_of_indent = 2) %>%
     add_indent(c(5,6), level_of_indent = 3)

However, this is manual, and therefore not really satisfactory.

I have two question:

1. If I want to use spaces, and would like a programmatic solution 
(versus a manual one), can this be done?

2. Stylistically, is there a better way to represent the nesting of 
lower rows in a table below upper rows? If I don't fixate on using 
spaces, is there anther way?

Thanks for your suggestions and advice.

-Kevin