[R] question

[Philippe Glaziou]

Fuensanta Saura Igual <igual at maFuensanta Saura Igual <igual at mat.uji.es> wrote:
> Does anyone know how I can read from a .txt file the lines that
> are between two strings whose location is unknown?
> 
> My problem is that I have a .txt file with data separated by a
> sentence, for example:
> 
> 2.22 3.45
> 1.56 2.31
> pattern 1
> 4.67 7.91
> 3.34 2.15
> 5.32 3.88
> pattern 2
> ...
> 
> I do not know the number of lines where these separating
> sentences are located, because the number of lines in between
> them can be random. If it was fixed, I think I could use
> "read.table" using the option "skip", but in this case, I do
> not know how I could manage to do that automatically.


This is a job for sed. The following command will delete any line
not starting with a digit from "file.txt" and save the results in
"file2.txt":

cat file.txt | sed -e '/^$\|^[^0-9]/D' > file2.txt

--
Philippe
Institut Pasteur du Cambodge