Generate fixed width file in R

write_fwf.R

#' Generate fixed width file in R
#' @description This simple function creates fixed width file with no 
#' extra dependencies. 
#' @param justify "l", "r" or something like "lrl" for left, right, left. 
#' @examples dt <- data.frame(a = 1:3, b = NA, c = c('a', 'b', 'c'))
#' write_fwf(dt, "test.txt", width = c(4, 4, 3))
#' @export
write_fwf = function(dt, file, width, 
                     justify = "l", replace_na = "NA") {
  fct_col = which(sapply(dt, is.factor))
  if (length(fct_col) > 0) {
    for (i in fct_col) {
      dt[,i] <- as.character(dt[,i])
    }
  }
  dt[is.na(dt)] = replace_na
  n_col = ncol(dt)
  justify = unlist(strsplit(justify, ""))
  justify = as.character(factor(justify, c("l", "r"), c("-", "")))
  if (n_col != 1) {
    if (length(width) == 1) width = rep(width, n_col)
    if (length(justify) == 1) justify = rep(justify, n_col)
  }
  sptf_fmt = paste0(
    paste0("%", justify, width, "s"), collapse = ""
  )
  tbl_content = do.call(sprintf, c(fmt = sptf_fmt, dt))
  tbl_header = do.call(sprintf, c(list(sptf_fmt), names(dt)))
  out = c(tbl_header, tbl_content)
  writeLines(out, file)
}