interpret superscript/subscript and other code snippet within the flextable

[eanokian]

Hi,

I have a flextable object where the content of a few cells contain text like "XXX~{super YYY}", which should be interpreted like XXX^YYY.

As far as I am aware, text within a flextable object is taken literally and there is no direct way to tell flextable to interpret it and make the conversion. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Therefore, I had to implement a function interpret_cell_content(s), which given a string s, returns the flextable code to do such conversion, for example:

interpret_cell_content("xxx~{super a}xxx~{sub b}xxx")

returns:

[1] "flextable::as_paragraph('xxx', flextable::as_sup('a'), 'xxx', flextable::as_sub('b'), 'xxx')"

and a second function interpret_all_cell_content(flx) that:

• iterates through every cell in the flextable object flx
• calls function code_snippet <- interpret_cell_content(cell_content) to obtain flextable snippet
• executes flx <- flextable::compose(flx, ..., value = eval(parse(text = code_snippet))) to overwrite the cell content

Of course, this is not ideal, as it requires potentially looping over all cells in the flextable, and I was wondering if there was a more straightforward approach to this.

Thank you in advance!