Last observation carried forward

[hadley]

It would be handy to provide a helper class that only produced a value when it changed

ie.

x <- c("a", "a", "a", "b", "b")
format(locf(x))
#> a . . b .

[krlmlr]

How do we decide when to use this formatting?

[hadley]

We don't - we just provide a helper class that allows the user to opt-in. I imagine we might have quite a few of these.

[huftis]

I like the suggestion, but this is (more or less) the opposite of ’last observation carried forward’. May I propose that the function is named something with ‘ditto’, e.g. style_ditto()?

The correct character to use is the ditto mark (〃), at least in vertical displays. It’s U+3003 in Unicode, available in R as "\U3003". (Of course, the normal ASCII quotation mark " can be used as a poor man’s substitute for the real ditto mark if necessary.)

[hadley]

Now think this is out of scope for pillar; pillar should be mostly focussed on multi-column displays.

[github-actions]

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