Setting the line length in R

Question

Google R style guide suggests line length of maximum 80 characters. I was wondering how do I set the line length in R. In stata this is done as:

set linesize 80

Peristyle

Answer 1

Is:

options()$width

what you want?

You can set it like:

options(width=80)

Earleanearleen

Note this sets the width of (most of) the output. Line width of input will be based on whatever editor/IDE you are using. – Tarrel

Note that if you use the RStudio IDE, this option seems to be dynamically modified each time you resize the IDE window. – Visional

Answer 2

If you are using R inside RStudio and/or within an rmarkdown (.Rmd) document, you can temporarily set the line length to format possible text output files.

An example:

ops <- options()
options(width=80) # Ensure that the printout formatting remains constant
writeLines(capture.output(sessionInfo()),
           file.path("your/folders/sessInfo.txt"))
options(ops); rm(ops)

When working within RStudio, the console line length is adjusted dynamically, and thus must be set within a chunk to affect the output.

Loiretcher