[R] Programcode and data in the same textfile

[(Ted Harding)]

On 12-Jun-03 Ted Harding wrote:
> i.e. the "here document" style of redirection that has been a part
> of Unix since approximately forever (if you take the origin of time
> as 01/01/70 00:00). Then the above data could be read in from within
> the source file by
> 
>   X<-read.table(header=TRUE,file="<< EOT")
>   Sex    Respons
>   Male   1
>   Male   2
>   Female 3
>   Female 4
>   EOT

A follow-up (should have thought to mention it last time).

Users of Unix troff / GNU groff may be familiar with the "inline data
input" used by 'pic', where the form is:

  .PS
  <pic commands>
  copy thru <macroname> until "EOT"
  1.1 1.2 1.3
  2.1 2.2 2.3
  ...
  9.1 9.2 9.3
  EOT
  <pic commands>
  .PE

This is exactly the same idea, and the more I think about it the more
attractive it seems to have this facility available in R. In fact,
the most useful implementation would be that wherever file="..."
could be used in a command to read from a text file, the form
file="<< MARKER" could be used to read in from the following lines of
the file.

Ted.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972
Date: 12-Jun-03                                       Time: 15:20:53
------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------