Option to remove unnecessary formatting with print of the summary methods

[tamas-ferenci]

I usually create the typical ''Table 1'' (basic patient demographics, potentially with some stratification like gender) with the summary methods of Hmisc (eg. summaryM, summary.formula). Their print method works nicely for character display, but if I further pass it (two typical examples: to a csv file, or to knitr::kable for a markdown file), it adds unnecessary formatting:

• It may break lines in the column titles
• It adds spaces before the absolute frequency for a categorical variables within the parenthesis

(There are possibly more similar examples, but these are the ones I found so for.)

I usually remove them manually:

temp[ 1, ] <- gsub( "\n", "", temp[ 1, ], fixed = TRUE )
for( i in 2:nrow( temp ) ) {
  for( j in 1:ncol( temp ) ) {
    temp[ i, j ] <- gsub( "\\s+(?=[^()]*\\))", "", trimws( temp[ i, j ] ), perl = TRUE )
  }
}

but it is everything but elegant.

Would it be possible to add an option to print which would make it not adding such formatting...?