[R] read.fwf and header

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "Gregor" == Gregor Gorjanc <gregor.gorjanc at bfro.uni-lj.si>
>>>>>     on Mon, 30 Oct 2006 23:33:21 +0100 writes:

    Gregor> Daniel Nordlund wrote:
    >> Gregor,
    >> 
    >> According to the help for read.fwf, sep needs to be set
    >> to a value that occurs only in the header record.  I
    >> changed the spaces to commas in the header record of your
    >> example and used the following syntax and was able to
    >> read the file just fine.
    >> 
    >> new.data<-read.fwf(file="test.txt", widths=c(3, 4, 10, 3,
    >> 2, 2, 2, 2, 11, 19), header=TRUE, sep=',')
    >> 
    >> Hope this is helpful,
    >> 
    >> Dan

    Gregor> Thanks Dan! But I have to modfy file first. Not that
    Gregor> much of work but still.

Yes, but I think it shows read.fwf() should not be extended for
even more special cases:

In my (and probably R-core's) view, read.fwf() should only have
to be used for ``legacy data files'' (those times when people used *no*
separators in order to save disk space), since nowadays, such
data files should "automatically" have correct separators. 

--> Fix the "file producing process" rather than make read.fwf()
unnecessarily more complicated.

Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich