[R] Convert char vector to numeric table

[james.holtman@convergys.com]

use 'textConnection':

> x.1 <- c('1 2 3','4 5 6','7 8 9','8 7 6','6 5 4')   # create character
vector
> x.in <- textConnection(x.1) # setup connection
> x.data <- read.table(x.in)  # read in the character vector
> x.data
  V1 V2 V3
1  1  2  3
2  4  5  6
3  7  8  9
4  8  7  6
5  6  5  4
>



                                                                                                                                           
                      "Nurnberg-LaZerte"                                                                                                   
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                      r-help-bounces at stat.m        Subject:  [R] Convert char vector to numeric table                                      
                      ath.ethz.ch                                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                           
                                                                                                                                           
                      03/31/03 17:09                                                                                                       
                      Please respond to                                                                                                    
                      Nurnberg-LaZerte                                                                                                     
                                                                                                                                           
                                                                                                                                           




I'm a great fan of read.table(), but this time the data had a lot of cruft.
So I used readLines() and editted the char vector to eventually get
something like this:
"     23.4   1.5   4.2"
"     19.1   2.2   4.1"
and so on. To get that into a 3 col numeric table, I first just used:

writeLines(data,"tempfile")
read.table("tempfile",col.names=c("A","B","C"))

Works fine, but writing to a temporary file seems ... inelegant?  And
read.table() doesn't take a char vector as a file or connection argument.
The following works but it seems like a lot of code:

data <- sub(" +","",data)                        # remove leading blanks
for strsplit
data <- strsplit(data," +")                            # strsplit returns a
list of char vectors
ndata <- character(0)                                  # vectorize the list
of char vectors
for (ii in 1:length(data)) ndata <- c(ndata,data[[ii]])
ndata <- as.numeric(ndata)
dim(ndata) <- c(3,length(data))
data <- t(ndata)
data.frame(A=data[,1],B=data[,2],C=data[,3])

Am I missing something?

Thanks,
Bruce L.

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