---
title: "Convenience Functions"
date: "`r Sys.Date()`"
output: rmarkdown::html_vignette
vignette: >
  %\VignetteIndexEntry{Convenience Functions}
  %\VignetteEngine{knitr::rmarkdown}
  %\VignetteEncoding{UTF-8}
---

```{r setup, include = FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)
```

## Convenience Functions

### The `formats()` function
The formats associated with a data frame can be easily extracted or 
assigned with the `formats()` function.  This function returns or accepts 
a named list of formatting objects.  The names of the list items 
correspond to the names of the columns in the data frame.  This function is
useful when you want to assign formats to many columns.

### The `fattr()` function
The `fattr()` function helps assign formatting attributes to a vector or
data frame column.  The `fattr()` function can assign the format, label,
description, width, 
and justify attributes all at once.  These attributes are passed in as
arguments to the `fattr()` function, instead of as properties on a call
to `attr()`.

### Other convenience functions
The `fmtr` package contains several other functions for setting attributes
easily.  These include the `descriptions()`, `widths()` and 
`justification()` functions to set
columns descriptions, column widths, and column justification 
on an entire data frame.  The package
also includes class testing functions like `is.format()` and `is.flist()`.

NOTE: In version 1.5.8 of **fmtr** the `labels()` function was
moved to the **common** package.  If you wish to use this function,
please include the **common** package instead.

Next: [Helper Functions](fmtr-helpers.html)