Replacing tabs with appropriate number of spaces
On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 10:39 AM, Dennis Fisher <fisher at plessthan.com> wrote:
Colleagues, Platform: OS X (but issue applies to all platforms) Version: 2.8.0 I have a mixture of text and data that I am outputting via R to a pdf document (using a fixed-width font). The text contains tabs that align columns properly with a fixed-width font in a terminal window. However, when the PDF document is created, the concept of a tab is not invoked properly and columns do not align. I could use brute force as follows: 1. identify lines of text containing tabs 2. strsplit on tabs 3. count characters preceding the tab, then replace the tab with the appropriate number of spaces (e.g., if the string preceding the tab has 29 characters, add 3 spaces), then paste(..., sep="")
Tabs usually just expand to a fixed number of spaces - so gsub("\t","
", text) would do the job.
Hadley