R markdown: levels of factor on different lines

Question

I am using R markdown to create student feedback sheets, based on survey data we collect from their assessors. Input has 10 questions imported in *.csv format. Example data:

question <- as.factor(c(NA, NA, "response 1.", "response 2.", NA, "response 3."))

At present I am running r levels(question)[-1] in my *.rmd file which gives me this output (with ", " as separators):

response 1., response 2., response 3.

Note that there are always some NAs so the [-1] is just to remove the NA level of the factor.

What I want is to create output with each response on a new line:

response 1. 

response 2.

response 3.

I can do this on single forms by specifying the levels on each level i.e.

r levels(question)[2]

r levels(question)[3]

r levels(question)[4]

However for each question there are variable numbers of non-NA responses (1 up to 4) so I need a solution which does not explicitly have to know how many there will be. i.e. same code will give desired formatting for both q1 and q2:

q1 <- as.factor(c(NA, NA, "response 1.", NA, NA, "response 2.")

q2 <- as.factor(c(NA, NA, "response 1.", "response 2.", "response 3.", "response 4.")

Usually I would address this with a for-loop but Markdown doesn't read code the same way as R console. Have tried as.character rather than as.factor but didn't seem to help; calling levels(question[-1]) seemed most straighforward method to remove NAs.

Thanks!

Ya, I'm also very unclear at what the specific question is here. — RTbecard, Feb 17 '16 at 01:17
@tospig `cat(paste0(levels(question), " \n"))` generates the desired output but puts it into the Rmarkdown console rather than printing it in place in the document... — CaitlinP, Feb 17 '16 at 01:26

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:52

you can use the new line markdown operator " \n" to put each response on a new line in your document.

```{r}
question <- as.factor(c(NA, NA, "response 1", "response 2", NA, "response 3"))
```

`r paste0(levels(question), "  \n", collapse="")`

I had a similar question to this here

Note that I used cat in my comment so you could see it printed in the console. In the markdown document the rendering is taken care of so you don't need the cat

R markdown: levels of factor on different lines

1 Answers1