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print should abbreviate columns larger than options(width)? #7718
Description
Below I ask for width=10 but that is only respected for the first three numeric columns.
> options(width=10, datatable.prettyprint.char=NULL, datatable.print.trunc.cols=FALSE, datatable.print.class=FALSE)
> data.table(V1=1, V2=2, V3=3, x="12345678901234567890", L=list(1:9))
V1 V2
1: 1 2
V3
1: 3
x
1: 12345678901234567890
L
1: 1,2,3,4,5,6,...[9]both x and L are wider than options(width=10), which seems to violate the definition in ?options:
‘width’:
controls the maximum number of columns on a line used in
printing vectors, matrices and arrays, and when filling by
cat.
I would ask to change the output to:
V1 V2
1: 1 2
V3
1: 3
x
1: 123456…
L
1: 1,2,3,…
Activity
tdhock commentedon Apr 21, 2026
to be fair, data.frame does no better:
tibble also goes over the 10 char width
tdhock commentedon Apr 21, 2026
my real use case is parsing text data. sometimes I have a character column with some elements much wider than 80 chars. In that case it would be nice if data table could truncate the character column to that many chars (or slightly smaller to fit).
maybe we could change the default, would
options(datatable.prettyprint.char=getOption("width")-5)be possible?venom1204 commentedon May 24, 2026
hi @joshhwuu
I’m planning to work on this issue, i have a below proposed fix for the issue ,if it sounds good then i will be ready to proceed with the pr .
The planned changes are:
getOption("width") - 5Lwhendatatable.prettyprint.charis NULL, so narrow consoles avoid line overflow.char.truncto list-column character representations to ensure long list outputs are also width-limited.is this in a right direction or there are any suggestions
tdhock commentedon May 25, 2026
great thx