[R] Reading ASCII files

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Cristian Pattaro wrote:

> Dear all,
> I need to read an ASCII file with diffent length lines.
> 
> This is what is contained in the file gene.txt:
> 1st line  ID description snp_id genotype
> 2nd line 10003 Low rs152240 
> 3rd line 10003 Moderate rs189011 TC
> 4th line 10004 Conservative rs152240 GC
> 5th line 10004 Bad rs154354
> 6th line 10013 Bad rs152240
> 7th line 10019 Conservative rs152240 AC
> etc...
> 
> This is what I would like to obtain in R:
> ID        description         snp_id          genotype
> 10003    Low                 rs152240     NA
> 10003    Moderate         rs189011     TC
> 10004    Conservative    rs152240     GC
> 10004    Bad                  rs154354     NA
> 10013    Bad                  rs152240     NA
> 10019    Conservative    rs152240     AC
> 
> Read.table() doesn't work in these situations because of the irregular 
> pattern of data. Have you got any suggestion?

Read the manual, for it does!  In particular, look at the argument

    fill: logical. If 'TRUE' then in case the rows have unequal length,
          blank fields are implicitly added.  See Details.



-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595