Redirect console output to dataframes in R

Question

What function or functions can you use redirect console output to a data frame in R? As an example, the following code associated with the mgcv package produces a set of diagnostics used to assist in model selection of GAMs:

gam.check(gamout, type=c("deviance")

It produces the following output

Method: GCV   Optimizer: magic
Smoothing parameter selection converged after 7 iterations.
The RMS GCV score gradient at convergence was 1.988039e-07 .
The Hessian was positive definite.
Model rank =  10 / 11 

Basis dimension (k) checking results. Low p-value (k-index<1) may
indicate that k is too low, especially if edf is close to k'.

          k'  edf k-index p-value
s(year) 9.00 3.42    1.18    0.79

I'm interested in redirecting this output to a data frame I can process into a table I can output and actually use rather than read off the console. I don't need specifics just functions I might be able to use to start solving the problem. Once I have the function, I can work my way through the specifics.

sink() this apparently outputs to a txt file which...I suppose I could use this function and then re-import the output but that seems like a pretty stupid solution.

Answer 1

The functions I would start with are class(gam.check(gamout, type="deviance")) and names(gam.check(gamout, type="deviance")) . This should help you figure out what the data structure is and then how to extract elements of it.