encodeString: Encode Character Vector as for Printing
In robertzk/monadicbase: The R Base Package

Description Usage Arguments Details Value Note See Also Examples

encodeString escapes the strings in a character vector in the same way print.default does, and optionally fits the encoded strings within a field width.

1 2	encodeString(x, width = 0, quote = "", na.encode = TRUE, justify = c("left", "right", "centre", "none"))

`x`	A character vector, or an object that can be coerced to one by `as.character`.
`width`	integer: the minimum field width. If `NULL` or `NA`, this is taken to be the largest field width needed for any element of `x`.
`quote`	character: quoting character, if any.
`na.encode`	logical: should `NA` strings be encoded?
`justify`	character: partial matches are allowed. If padding to the minimum field width is needed, how should spaces be inserted? `justify == "none"` is equivalent to `width = 0`, for consistency with `format.default`.

This escapes backslash and the control characters \a (bell), \b (backspace), \f (formfeed), \n (line feed), \r (carriage return), \t (tab) and \v (vertical tab) as well as any non-printable characters in a single-byte locale, which are printed in octal notation (\xyz with leading zeroes).

Which characters are non-printable depends on the current locale. Windows' reporting of printable characters is unreliable, so there all other control characters are regarded as non-printable, and all characters with codes 32–255 as printable in a single-byte locale. See print.default for how non-printable characters are handled in multi-byte locales.

If quote is a single or double quote any embedded quote of the same type is escaped. Note that justification is of the quoted string, hence spaces are added outside the quotes.

A character vector of the same length as x, with the same attributes (including names and dimensions) but with no class set.

As from R 3.0.0, marked UTF-8 encodings are preserved.

The default for width is different from format.default, which does similar things for character vectors but without encoding using escapes.

print.default

x <- "ab\bc\ndef"
print(x)
cat(x) # interprets escapes
cat(encodeString(x), "\n", sep = "") # similar to print()

factor(x) # makes use of this to print the levels

x <- c("a", "ab", "abcde")
encodeString(x, width = NA) # left justification
encodeString(x, width = NA, justify = "c")
encodeString(x, width = NA, justify = "r")
encodeString(x, width = NA, quote = "'", justify = "r")