clintable: Create a new clintable object

In clinify: Clinical Table Styling Tools and Utilities

Create a new clintable object

Description

A clintable object directly inherits from a flextable object. This function will pass all necessary parameters flextable::flextable() and conver the object to a clintable

Usage

clintable(
  x,
  page_by = NULL,
  group_by = NULL,
  use_labels = TRUE,
  coerce_character = FALSE,
  ...
)

Arguments

x	A data frame
page_by	A variable in the input dataframe to use for pagination
group_by	A character vector of variable names which will be used for grouping and attached as a label above the table headers
use_labels	Use variable labels as column headers. Nested levels can be achieved using the string "||" as a delimitter. Horizontally adjacent cells using identical words will be merged, which can be adjusted afterwards using the merge argument of clin_column_headers().
coerce_character	Coerce every column of x to character before the flextable is built, so pre-formatted values render exactly as supplied. Defaults to FALSE, which leaves flextable's numeric formatting in place.
...	Parameters to pass to flextable::flextable()

Value

A clintable object

Rendering values verbatim

flextable bakes cell text in when the table is built, and it formats a double column as a whole with format(x, trim = TRUE, scientific = FALSE, big.mark = ","). Because that decision is column wide, a clinical summary column holding a count in one row and a statistic in another - necessarily a double - is reformatted against its neighbours: c(86, 75.2) renders the count as "86.0", c(1234, 12.5) renders it as "1,234.0", and c(1234567.891, 2) is rounded to seven significant digits as "1,234,568". Values that were already formatted upstream are therefore silently changed, and nothing errors to say so.

coerce_character = TRUE runs as.character() over every column first, so each value carries into the table as its own string and no column wide decision is made. It replaces the lapply(x, as.character) line that otherwise has to be written ahead of every table. Column label attributes survive the coercion, so use_labels still finds them. Factors coerce to their levels rather than their integer codes.

Two side effects are worth knowing about. Numeric columns lose the right alignment flextable's default theme gives them, since alignment follows column type; use clin_table_align() or flextable::align() to put it back. And flextable's formula selectors compare against the coerced values, so bold(i = ~ n > 5) becomes a string comparison and quietly selects different rows.

NA is left as NA

as.character(NA) is NA_character_, and flextable's default na_str is "", so an NA still renders as a blank cell. NA is deliberately not replaced with "", which is safe in a body column but changes the meaning of a pagination variable.

clin_page_by() splits where the page variable changes, as does clin_group_by() by default, and that comparison is x != lag(x). It is NA wherever either side is NA, and those rows are dropped rather than treated as splits. So a page_by, group_by, or caption_by column that is padded - carrying its value only on the first row of each block, NA below - collapses to a single page with no group label. A variable used that way needs clin_group_by(when = "notempty"), which tests against "" and handles NA just as well, and clin_page_by() offers no such option so its page variable has to carry a value on every row.

Padding and a change comparison do not go together whichever the pad is, but they fail differently, and the NA failure is the quieter one: "" padding makes each padded row look like a change and splits on every one of them, which is hard to miss, where NA padding drops the splits and leaves a plausible looking single page.

Examples

clintable(mtcars)

# A summary column holding a count and a mean is a double, so flextable
# would render the count 86 as "86.0". Coercion keeps it as written.
summary_dat <- data.frame(
  row_label = c("n", "Mean"),
  trt_a = c(86, 75.2)
)
clintable(summary_dat, coerce_character = TRUE)

clinify documentation built on Aug. 2, 2026, 1:06 a.m.