[R] Reading complicated data file

[John Fox]

Dear Jakub,

At 01:15 PM 9/25/2002 +0200, zlamal at ufi.fme.vutbr.cz wrote:
>Hi, I am new in R and I have problem with reading this data file
>
>0 TITLE Title
>  0 XLEGEND Legend
>-1 LABEL x
>1 1 12
>1 2 30
>1 3 34

If you know in advance where the data starts (i.e., that you need to skip 
the first 3 rows), then you can read the data file with read.table in the 
usual manner, but specifying the argument skip=3. This also supposes that 
the lines to be skipped precede the data.

If the situation is more complicated -- e.g., you don't know in advance how 
many lines to skip, or the data and non-data lines are intermixed -- then 
there are several ways to proceed. One way would be to read the data in the 
usual manner, and then to select rows for which the first column is 1; with 
this approach, you would also have to handle converting columns two and 
three to numeric. Alternatively, you could read the file line-by-line (see 
?readLines).

I hope that this helps,
  John
-----------------------------------------------------
John Fox
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4M4
email: jfox at mcmaster.ca
phone: 905-525-9140x23604
web: www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/jfox
-----------------------------------------------------

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