tibbles printing with superscripted numbers for some column names

tidyverse
1

I recently noticed tibbles being printed with superscripted numbers for (some) column names. Is this behavior documented somewhere? (I imagine it is, but apparently my search skills are failing me.)

Example that triggers this behavior:

bwar_bat = readr::read_csv("https://www.baseball-reference.com/data/war_daily_bat.txt")
bwar_bat

Example of column names that I see:

name_…¹ age   mlb_ID playe…² year_ID team_ID stint…³ lg_ID PA

Session information:

─ Session info ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 setting  value
 version  R version 4.2.0 (2022-04-22)
 os       macOS Monterey 12.5
 system   x86_64, darwin17.0
 ui       RStudio
 language (EN)
 collate  en_US.UTF-8
 ctype    en_US.UTF-8
 tz       America/Chicago
 date     2022-08-06
 rstudio  2022.11.0-daily+82 Elsbeth Geranium (desktop)
 pandoc   NA

─ Packages ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 package       * version date (UTC) lib source
 assertthat      0.2.1   2019-03-21 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 backports       1.4.1   2021-12-13 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 bit             4.0.4   2020-08-04 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 bit64           4.0.5   2020-08-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 broom           1.0.0   2022-07-01 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 cachem          1.0.6   2021-08-19 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 callr           3.7.1   2022-07-13 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 cellranger      1.1.0   2016-07-27 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 cli             3.3.0   2022-04-25 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 colorspace      2.0-3   2022-02-21 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 crayon          1.5.1   2022-03-26 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 curl            4.3.2   2021-06-23 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 DBI             1.1.3   2022-06-18 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 dbplyr          2.2.1   2022-06-27 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 devtools      * 2.4.4   2022-07-20 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 digest          0.6.29  2021-12-01 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 dplyr         * 1.0.9   2022-04-28 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 ellipsis        0.3.2   2021-04-29 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 fansi           1.0.3   2022-03-24 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 fastmap         1.1.0   2021-01-25 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 forcats       * 0.5.1   2021-01-27 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 fs              1.5.2   2021-12-08 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 gargle          1.2.0   2021-07-02 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 generics        0.1.3   2022-07-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 ggplot2       * 3.3.6   2022-05-03 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 glue            1.6.2   2022-02-24 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 googledrive     2.0.0   2021-07-08 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 googlesheets4   1.0.0   2021-07-21 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 gtable          0.3.0   2019-03-25 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 haven           2.5.0   2022-04-15 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 hms             1.1.1   2021-09-26 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 htmltools       0.5.3   2022-07-18 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 htmlwidgets     1.5.4   2021-09-08 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 httpuv          1.6.5   2022-01-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 httr            1.4.3   2022-05-04 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 jsonlite        1.8.0   2022-02-22 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 later           1.3.0   2021-08-18 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 lifecycle       1.0.1   2021-09-24 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 lubridate       1.8.0   2021-10-07 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 magrittr        2.0.3   2022-03-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 memoise         2.0.1   2021-11-26 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 mime            0.12    2021-09-28 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 miniUI          0.1.1.1 2018-05-18 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 modelr          0.1.8   2020-05-19 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 munsell         0.5.0   2018-06-12 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 pillar          1.8.0   2022-07-18 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 pkgbuild        1.3.1   2021-12-20 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 pkgconfig       2.0.3   2019-09-22 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 pkgload         1.3.0   2022-06-27 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 prettyunits     1.1.1   2020-01-24 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 processx        3.7.0   2022-07-07 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 profvis         0.3.7   2020-11-02 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 promises        1.2.0.1 2021-02-11 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 ps              1.7.1   2022-06-18 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 purrr         * 0.3.4   2020-04-17 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 R6              2.5.1   2021-08-19 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 Rcpp            1.0.9   2022-07-08 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 readr         * 2.1.2   2022-01-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 readxl          1.4.0   2022-03-28 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 remotes         2.4.2   2021-11-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 reprex          2.0.1   2021-08-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 rlang           1.0.4   2022-07-12 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 rstudioapi      0.13    2020-11-12 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 rvest           1.0.2   2021-10-16 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 scales          1.2.0   2022-04-13 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 sessioninfo     1.2.2   2021-12-06 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 shiny           1.7.2   2022-07-19 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 stringi         1.7.8   2022-07-11 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 stringr       * 1.4.0   2019-02-10 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 tibble        * 3.1.8   2022-07-22 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 tidyr         * 1.2.0   2022-02-01 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 tidyselect      1.1.2   2022-02-21 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 tidyverse     * 1.3.2   2022-07-18 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 tzdb            0.3.0   2022-03-28 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 urlchecker      1.0.1   2021-11-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 usethis       * 2.1.6   2022-05-25 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 utf8            1.2.2   2021-07-24 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 vctrs           0.4.1   2022-04-13 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 vroom           1.5.7   2021-11-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 withr           2.5.0   2022-03-03 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 xml2            1.3.3   2021-11-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)
 xtable          1.8-4   2019-04-21 [1] CRAN (R 4.2.0)

 [1] /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.2/Resources/library
2

Just a guess but it probably is some kind of notice that RStudio is not displaying the full column name due to space constraints.

Try

names(bwar_bat)

and see what you get

3

I see the issue now. The superscripts are essentially referencing footnotes, to show the full variable names of columns with shortened names for printing. Just happens that the first few examples I've seen of this (including the one above), the explanation doesn't appear because of the large number of columns. If the footer was one line longer, it would have been obvious to me!

4

Thanks. I missed the footnotes and should have realised they had to be there.

5

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