[R] seemingly simple read.table question

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Try this (which reads in the lines, replaces commas with spaces
and then rereads it as a data frame using column 1 as the rows:

read.table(textConnection(chartr(",", " ", readLines("myfile.dat"))),
row = 1, as.is = TRUE)

I assume you want character data, not factors, but if you want factors
remove the as.is = TRUE.

On 6/11/06, markleeds at verizon.net <markleeds at verizon.net> wrote:
> I have a file that I thought would be fairly simple to read in using read.table but I am having problems ( as usual ).
>
> each line of the file is of the form ( just 20 lines or so )
>
> financials XXX, YYY, ZZZ
> automobiles RTR, ABC, TGH
>
> so the first field in the line is the industry and the other fields
> ( seperated by commas ) in the line are stock identifiers of stocks
> in that industry. note that there is no comma between the industry
> and the first stock identifier in the group which i guess might
> complicate things ?
>
> my goal is to make the row names the industries and the stock
> identifiers the column data but i don't
> have a header so , i am unclear ( reading the help on
> read.table ) how to tell R that the first field in each line
> should be used as the row name ? Thanks for any help
> or for telling me tht this is not possible. This will be my last bother of the day to the help group.
>
> I am using R-2.20 on windows xp and i've tried various settings
> of read.table without success. thanks.
>
>                                                mark
>
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