From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: "Charles C. Berry" <ccberry@ucsd.edu>
Subject: Re: Preventing RESULTS from being formatted as org table [ob-awk]
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2016 14:02:08 -0700
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To: "Thomas S. Dye" <tsd@tsdye.com>
Cc: emacs-org list <emacs-orgmode@gnu.org>, eschulte@cs.unm.edu, Kaushal Modi <kaushal.modi@gmail.com>

On Sun, 12 Jun 2016, Thomas S. Dye wrote:

> Aloha Kaushal,
>
> Kaushal Modi writes:
>

[deleted]

>>
>> So what determines if the results should be table formatted or kept verbatim
>> (scalar)?
>> --
>
> I think I'm correct to say that by default a single value result is
> output as a scalar, and everything else is converted to an Org mode
> table.
>

TL;DR: That is almost correct. `:post' header arg gives fine control of 
formatting if needed.

`org-babel-insert-result' formats anything that isn't a string or a list 
using "%S". Then it tries hard to turn a list into a "table". Lists that 
cannot be made into tables are formatted as strings with "%s\n". However, 
various languages have their own formatting principles, so what 
`org-babel-insert-result' gets as the `result' is a bit idiosyncratic.

You can get a deeper look at the `result' by pretty printing it with the 
aid of a :post header arg. Example:


#+NAME: I-feel-pretty
#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp :results pp
*this*
#+END_SRC

This elisp list is not revised:

#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp :post I-feel-pretty
'(a b c (d . e))
#+END_SRC

#+RESULTS:
: (a b c
:    (d . e))


But R turns its list into an R data.frame and then into a elisp list with 
an element for each row:

#+BEGIN_SRC R :post I-feel-pretty
list(a="a",b="b", c="c", d=c("d", "e"))
#+END_SRC

#+RESULTS:
: (("a" "b" "c" "d")
:  ("a" "b" "c" "e"))

HTH,

Chuck