Spicy Table Engine: Frequency and Cross-tabulation Rendering

The spicy table engine provides a cohesive set of tools for creating and printing formatted ASCII tables in R, designed for descriptive statistics.

Functions in this family include:

• freq() — frequency tables with support for weights, labelled data, and cumulative percentages

• spicy_print_table() — general-purpose ASCII table printer

• build_ascii_table() — internal rendering engine for column alignment and formatting

Details

All functions in this family share a common philosophy:

• Console-friendly display with Unicode box-drawing characters

• Consistent alignment and spacing across outputs

• Automatic detection of variable type (factor, labelled, numeric)

• Optional integration of variable labels and weighting information

Core functions

• freq() — Main entry point for generating frequency tables.

• spicy_print_table() — Applies formatting and optional titles or notes.

• build_ascii_table() — Internal engine handling padding, alignment, and box rules.

Output styling

The spicy table engine supports multiple padding options via padding: "compact" (default), "normal", and "wide". Horizontal and vertical rules can be customized, and colors are supported when the terminal allows ANSI color output (via the crayon package).

See also

print.spicy_freq_table() for the specialized frequency display method. labelled::to_factor() and dplyr::pull() for data transformations.