R: Wrap Character Strings to Format Paragraphs

strwrap {base} | R Documentation

## Wrap Character Strings to Format Paragraphs

### Description

Each character string in the input is first split into paragraphs (on lines containing whitespace only). The paragraphs are then formatted by breaking lines at word boundaries. The target columns for wrapping lines and the indentation of the first and all subsequent lines of a paragraph can be controlled independently.

### Usage

    strwrap(x, width = 0.9 * getOption("width"), indent = 0, exdent = 0,
            prefix = "", simplify = TRUE)

### Arguments

`x` | a character vector
`width` | a positive integer giving the target column for wrapping lines in the output.
`indent` | a non-negative integer giving the indentation of the first line in a paragraph.
`exdent` | a non-negative integer specifying the indentation of subsequent lines in paragraphs.
`prefix` | a character string to be used as prefix for each line.
`simplify` | a logical. If `TRUE`, the result is a single character vector of line text; otherwise, it is a list of the same length as `x` the elements of which are character vectors of line text obtained from the corresponding element of `x`. (Hence, the result in the former case is obtained by unlisting that of the latter.)

### Details

Whitespace in the input is destroyed. Double spaces after periods (thought as representing sentence ends) are preserved. Currently, it possible sentence ends at line breaks are not considerd specially.

Indentation is relative to the number of characters in the prefix string.

### Examples

    ## Read in file `THANKS'.
    x <- paste(readLines(file.path(R.home(), "THANKS")), collapse = "\n")
    ## Split into paragraphs and remove the first three ones
    x <- unlist(strsplit(x, "\n[ \t\n]*\n"))[-(1:3)]
    ## Join the rest
    x <- paste(x, collapse = "\n\n")
    ## Now for some fun:
    writeLines(strwrap(x, width = 60))
    writeLines(strwrap(x, width = 60, indent = 5))
    writeLines(strwrap(x, width = 60, exdent = 5))
    writeLines(strwrap(x, prefix = "THANKS> "))

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