pillar provides tools for styling columns of data, artfully using colour and unicode characters to guide the eye.
Installation
# pillar is installed if you install the tidyverse package:
install.packages("tidyverse")
# Alternatively, install just pillar:
install.packages("pillar")Usage
pillar is a developer-facing package that is not designed for end-users. It powers the print() and format() methods for tibbles. It also and defines generics and helpers that are useful for package authors who create custom vector classes (see https://github.com/krlmlr/awesome-vctrs#readme for examples) or custom table classes (like dbplyr or sf).
library(pillar)
x <- 123456789 * (10^c(-3, -5, NA, -8, -10))
pillar(x)
#> <pillar>
#> <dbl>
#> 123457.
#> 1235.
#> NA
#> 1.23
#> 0.0123
tbl_format_setup(tibble::tibble(x))
#> <pillar_tbl_format_setup>
#> <tbl_format_header(setup)>
#> # A tibble: 5 × 1
#> <tbl_format_body(setup)>
#> x
#> <dbl>
#> 1 123457.
#> 2 1235.
#> 3 NA
#> 4 1.23
#> 5 0.0123
#> <tbl_format_footer(setup)>Custom vector classes
The primary user of this package is tibble, which lets pillar do all the formatting work. Packages that implement a data type to be used in a tibble column can customize the display by implementing a pillar_shaft() method.
library(pillar)
percent <- vctrs::new_vctr(9:11 * 0.01, class = "percent")
pillar_shaft.percent <- function(x, ...) {
fmt <- format(vctrs::vec_data(x) * 100)
new_pillar_shaft_simple(paste0(fmt, " ", style_subtle("%")), align = "right")
}
pillar(percent)
#> <pillar>
#> <percent>
#> 9 %
#> 10 %
#> 11 %See vignette("pillar", package = "vctrs") for details.
Custom table classes
pillar provides various extension points for customizing how a tibble-like class is printed.
tbl <- vctrs::new_data_frame(list(a = 1:3), class = c("my_tbl", "tbl"))
tbl_sum.my_tbl <- function(x, ...) {
c("Hello" = "world!")
}
tbl
#> # Hello: world!
#> a
#> <int>
#> 1 1
#> 2 2
#> 3 3See vignette("extending", package = "pillar") for a walkthrough of the options.