[R] column-binary data

[(Ted Harding)]

On 16-Sep-05 jim holtman wrote:
> Each card column had 12 rows, so as binary it comes in as 12 bits. The 
> question is does this come as a 16 bit integer, or a string of 12 bits
> that I have to extract from. Either case is not that difficult to do.

Indeed ... as an example of how one could proceed, I "deconstruct"
my example below (see at end).

> On 9/16/05, Ted Harding <Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk> wrote: 
>> 
>> On 16-Sep-05 David Barron wrote:
>> > I have a number of datasets that are multipunch column-binary
>> > format.
>> > Does anyone have any advice on how to read this into R? Thanks.
>> >
>> > David
>> 
>> Do you mean something like the old
>> 
>> HOLLERITH PUNCHED CARD BINARY FORMAT?
>> 1111111110111111101111011111101111110
>> 0000000001000000010000100000010000001
>> 0000010100110000000010000001100010011
>> 1111001010001010000000001100100101001
>> 0111100100011001100001000100001101011
>> 0100010000001100001010010101001110001
>> 0100101000010101001100001010100101101
>> 
>> (here "1" = hole in card, binary representation of 7-bit ASCII
>> encoding, high-order bit on top).

#First, construct a vector ASCII consiting of the printable
#characters:

ASCII<-c(" ","!","\"","#","$","%","&","'","(",")",
         "*","+",",","-",".","/","0","1","2","3",
         "4","5","6","7","8","9",":",";","<","=",
         ">","?","@","A","B","C","D","E","F","G",
         "H","I","J","K","L","M","N","O","P","Q",
         "R","S","T","U","V","W","X","Y","Z","[",
         "\\","]","^","_","`","a","b","c","d","e",
         "f","g","h","i","j","k","l","m","n","o",
         "p","q","r","s","t","u","v","w","x","y",
         "z","{","|","}","~")


#Next, a vector of powers of 2:

rad<-2^(6:0)


#Read in the data from stdin():

M<-t(matrix(as.integer(unlist((strsplit(scan(stdin(),
     what="character"),split="")))),ncol=7))

#(read 7 lines from stdin by copy&paste:
#1: 1111111110111111101111011111101111110
#2: 0000000001000000010000100000010000001
#3: 0000010100110000000010000001100010011
#4: 1111001010001010000000001100100101001
#5: 0111100100011001100001000100001101011
#6: 0100010000001100001010010101001110001
#7: 0100101000010101001100001010100101101
#8: 
#Read 7 items

#and convert the columns to ASCII codes:

R<-rad%*%M

#and see what you've got:

paste(ASCII[R-31],collapse="")

#[1] "HOLLERITH PUNCHED CARD BINARY FORMAT?"

The above can be adapted to whatever your binary data represent
and to how they are laid out in the input.

Others may find a slicker way of doing this.

The only fly in the above ointment is that I haven't located
in R a character-vector constant which consists of the printable
ASCII characters, or a function to convert numerical ASCII code
to characters, so I made my own.

Best wishes,
Ted.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
Date: 16-Sep-05                                       Time: 22:26:16
------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------