gt_merge_stack() and NA

[andrew-griffen]

Description

I have a data.frame with NA, which I replace with "" using gt::sub_missing(). But when I then pass to gt_merge_stack(), it unexpectedly prints an NA character in the table for col2.

Reproducible example

data.frame(a = 1, b = 2, c = NA, d = NA) |>
gt() |>
sub_missing(missing_text="") |>
gt_merge_stack(a,b) |>
gt_merge_stack(c,d)

Expected result

I wasn't expecting column c in the gt object to have anything since I had applied sub_missing() but instead it has an NA character for col2 (=d). I think the problem lies in gt_index() which returns NA to data_in even if sub_missing() has been applied. cols_merge() doesn't have this behavior. For example, if instead I used cols_merge(columns = c(c,d), pattern = "{1}
{2}") it gives what I was expecting (except gt_merge_stack has much better spacing). I made a local gt_merge_stack2() and added data_in <- ifelse(is.na(data_in),"",data_in) after data_in is first defined and it gives the expected behavior for this MWE but I'm not sure whether that conflicts with other functions in the package.

Session info

R version 4.4.1 (2024-06-14)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
Running under: Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS

Matrix products: default
BLAS: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libblas.so.3
LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libopenblasp-r0.3.20.so; LAPACK version 3.10.0

locale:
[1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C
[3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
[5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
[7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C
[9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

time zone: Asia/Tokyo
tzcode source: system (glibc)

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base

other attached packages:
[1] gtExtras_0.5.0 gt_0.10.1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] vctrs_0.6.5 knitr_1.47 cli_3.6.2 xfun_0.44
[5] rlang_1.1.4 rematch2_2.1.2 generics_0.1.3 glue_1.7.0
[9] colorspace_2.1-0 htmltools_0.5.8.1 sass_0.4.9 scales_1.3.0
[13] fansi_1.0.6 grid_4.4.1 munsell_0.5.1 tibble_3.2.1
[17] fontawesome_0.5.2 fastmap_1.2.0 lifecycle_1.0.4 compiler_4.4.1
[21] dplyr_1.1.4 pkgconfig_2.0.3 rstudioapi_0.16.0 farver_2.1.2
[25] digest_0.6.35 paletteer_1.6.0 R6_2.5.1 tidyselect_1.2.1
[29] utf8_1.2.4 pillar_1.9.0 magrittr_2.0.3 withr_3.0.0
[33] tools_4.4.1 gtable_0.3.5 xml2_1.3.6 ggplot2_3.5.1