[R] Programcode and data in the same textfile

[Thomas W Blackwell]

Ernst  -

Here's a solution which works for me, and seems to do
what you want.  It's a bit of a hack, since it requires
you, the author, to know in advance what file path name
the student will have saved the file as.  In my example,
this will be "./r.source.file", and this includes one
blank line before the first assignment statement below.

It also requires knowing how many lines of code precede
the data lines.  But it _is_ a one-file solution, as
requested.  Put the following 9 or 10 lines into a
file named "r.source.file", then source it.

data.01 <- read.table(file="r.source.file", header=T,
	skip=4, comment.char="")[-1]

 # junk Sex      Response
    #   Male     1
    #   Male     2
    #   Female   3
    #   Female   4


I'm quite surprised no one else has suggested this already.

-  tom blackwell  -  u michigan medical school  -  ann arbor  -

On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, Ernst Hansen wrote:

> PROBLEM: Is there any way I can have a single textfile that contains both
>  a) data   b) programcode
> The program should act on the data, if the textfile is source()'ed
> into R.
>
> BOUNDARY CONDITION: I want the data written in the textfile in exactly
> the same format as I would use, if I had data in a separate textfile,
> to be read by read.table().   something like
>
>       Sex    Respons
>       Male   1
>       Male   2
>       Female 3
>       Female 4
>
> MOTIVATION: I frequently find myself distributing small chunks of code
> to my students, along with data on which the code can work.
>
> As an example, I might want to demonstrate how model.matrix() treats
> interactions, in a certain setting.  For that I need a dataframe that
> is complex enough to exhibit the behaviour I want, but still so small
> that the model.matrix is easily understood.  So I make such a dataframe.
>
> I am trying to distribute this dataframe along with my code, in a way
> that is as simple as possible to USE for the students (hence the
> one-file boundary condition) and to READ (hence the non-transposition
> boundary condition).
>
> Ernst Hansen
> Department of Statistics
> University of Copenhagen