ascii package

Summary

ascii is an R package that provides formatted tables and lists in a number of markup formats (Asciidoc, txt2tags, reStructuredText, Org, Pandoc markdown and textile). Documents in Rmarkdown and Org mode can include R code blocks that produce markup output. Sweave drivers are also available for all six markup formats, including caching through weaver. Finally, the package supports R scripting to export reports to a variety of formats.

What ascii provides

ascii provides:

• a generic method: ascii(). It creates a plain text representations of many R objects.
• several classic Sweave drivers: RweaveAsciidoc(), RweaveT2t(), RweaveReST(), RweaveOrg(), RweavePandoc() and RweaveTextile().
• weaver based Sweave drivers: weaverAsciidoc(), weaverT2t(), weaverReST(), weaverOrg(), weaverPandoc() and weaverTextile().
• some simple wrappers for Sweave() named Asciidoc(), T2t(), ReST(), Org(), Pandoc() and Textile().
• a Report class for R scripting.

ascii methods

ascii provides methods for:

library(ascii)
methods(ascii)

 [1] ascii.anova*                    ascii.aov*                     
 [3] ascii.aovlist*                  ascii.cast_df*                 
 [5] ascii.character*                ascii.coxph*                   
 [7] ascii.CrossTable*               ascii.data.frame*              
 [9] ascii.default*                  ascii.density*                 
[11] ascii.describe*                 ascii.describe.single*         
[13] ascii.factor*                   ascii.freqtable*               
[15] ascii.ftable*                   ascii.glm*                     
[17] ascii.htest*                    ascii.integer*                 
[19] ascii.list*                     ascii.lm*                      
[21] ascii.matrix*                   ascii.meanscomp*               
[23] ascii.mtable*                   ascii.numeric*                 
[25] ascii.packageDescription*       ascii.prcomp*                  
[27] ascii.proc_time*                ascii.sessionInfo*             
[29] ascii.simple.list*              ascii.smooth.spline*           
[31] ascii.stat.table*               ascii.summary.aov*             
[33] ascii.summary.aovlist*          ascii.summary.formula.cross*   
[35] ascii.summary.formula.response* ascii.summary.formula.reverse* 
[37] ascii.summary.glm*              ascii.summary.lm*              
[39] ascii.summary.prcomp*           ascii.summary.survfit*         
[41] ascii.summary.table*            ascii.survdiff*                
[43] ascii.survfit*                  ascii.table*                   
[45] ascii.ts*                       ascii.zoo*                     
see '?methods' for accessing help and source code

Examples

Pandoc markdown using R markdown

A source Rmd file is here. It can be processed to export to HTML using:

library(rmarkdown)
library(prettydoc)
rmarkdown::render(system.file("examples/test-1-Rmd.Rmd",package="ascii"), html_pretty())

Pandoc markdown using Noweb

A source Noweb file is here. It can be processed to export to HTML using:

Pandoc(system.file("examples/Pandoc-test-1.nw",package="ascii"))
system("pandoc Pandoc-test-1.md > Pandoc-test-1.html")

Alternatively, to allow caching using weaver, we can use:

Pandoc(system.file("examples/Pandoc-test-1.nw",package="ascii"), driver=weaverPandoc())
system("pandoc Pandoc-test-1.md > Pandoc-test-1.html")

Asciidoc markup using Noweb

A source Noweb file is here. It can be processed to export to HTML using:

Asciidoc(system.file("examples/Asciidoc-test-1.nw",package="ascii"))
system("asciidoc Asciidoc-test-1.txt")

Alternatively, to allow caching using weaver, we can use:

Asciidoc(system.file("examples/Asciidoc-test-1.nw",package="ascii"),driver=weaverAsciidoc())
system("asciidoc Asciidoc-test-1.txt")

ReStructured Text markup using Noweb

A source Noweb file is here It can be processed to export to HTML using:

ReST(system.file("examples/ReST-test-1.nw",package="ascii"))
system("rst2html ReST-test-1.rst > ReST-test-1.html")

Alternatively, to allow caching using weaver, we can use:

ReST(system.file("examples/ReST-test-1.nw",package="ascii"), driver=weaverReST())
system("rst2html ReST-test-1.rst > ReST-test-1.html")

Textile markup using Noweb

A source Noweb file is here. It can be processed to export to HTML using:

Textile(system.file("examples/Textile-test-1.nw",package="ascii"))
system("textile Textile-test-1.txt > Textile-test-1.html")

Alternatively, to allow caching using weaver, we can use:

Textile(system.file("examples/Textile-test-1.nw",package="ascii"), driver=weaverTextile())
system("textile Textile-test-1.txt > Textile-test-1.html")

Txt2tags markup using Noweb

A source Noweb file is here. It can be processed to export to HTML using:

T2t(system.file("examples/T2t-test-1.nw",package="ascii"))
system("txt2tags -t html T2t-test-1.t2t")

Alternatively, to allow caching using weaver, we can use:

T2t(system.file("examples/T2t-test-1.nw",package="ascii"), driver=weaverT2t())
system("txt2tags -t html T2t-test-1.t2t")

Org markup using Noweb

A source Noweb file is here. It can be processed to export to HTML using:

Org(system.file("examples/Org-test-1.nw",package="ascii"))

Alternatively, to allow caching using weaver, we can use:

Org(system.file("examples/Org-test-1.nw",package="ascii"), driver=weaverOrg())

Org mode using R code blocks

A more typical use of ascii with Org mode would be to use Babel with R code blocks. Initially, we set some options, including the default for asciiType.

options(asciiType = "org", width = 80)

Simple output

In Org Mode, we can use :results output wrap to get Org output:

x <- matrix(1:4, 2, 2)
ascii(x, TRUE, TRUE)

This gives the following output:

	1	2
1	1.00	3.00
2	2.00	4.00

The same with some options:

ascii(x, caption = "A simple matrix", width = 50, digits = 0, align = c("c", "r"),
      style = matrix(c("d", "s", "e", "m"), 2, 2), lgroup = "group 1",
      tgroup = "group 2")

	*group 2*
**group 1**	1	3
	2	4

Note that the GitHub parser for .org files does not format this correctly.

A list example

y <- summary(with(esoph, table(alcgp, agegp)))
ascii(y, caption = "A simple list")

• Number of cases in table: 88
• Number of factors: 2
• Test for independence of all factors:
  • Chisq = 1.4189, df = 15, p-value = 1
  • Chi-squared approximation may be incorrect

Using the Report class

The code snippet below shows the use of the Report class:

options(asciiType = "asciidoc")
createreport(head(esoph))

r <- Report$new(author = "David Hajage", email = "dhajage at gmail dot com")
r$add(section("First section"))
r$addSection("First subsection", 2)
r$add(paragraph("The data set has", sexpr(nrow(esoph)), " lines. See yourself:"), esoph)
r$addSection("Second subsection: age and alc group", 2)
tab <- with(esoph, table(alcgp, agegp))
r$add(ascii(tab), ascii(summary(tab), format = "nice"))
r$create()
r$format <- "slidy"
r$create()

r$title <- "R report example"
r$author <- "David Hajage"
r$email <- "dhajage at gmail dot com"
options(asciiType = "pandoc")
r$backend <- "pandoc"
r$format <- "odt"
r$create()