[R] Of fixed column format (and more fixed mindsets)

[arin basu]

> 
> Message: 107
> Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 05:25:09 -0400
> From: Michael Kubovy <kubovy at virginia.edu>
> Subject: Re: [R] Reading fixed column format
> To: Anupam Tyagi <AnupTyagi at yahoo.com>
> Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Message-ID: <3EBEC9D3-559C-4607-838D-46042D36A3AA at virginia.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
> 
> On Sep 12, 2006, at 2:47 AM, Anupam Tyagi wrote:
> 
> > Jason Barnhart <jasoncbarnhart <at> msn.com> writes:
> >
> >>
> >> These posts may be helpful.
> >> http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/05/06/5776.html
> >> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2002-May/021145.html
> >>
> >> Using scan directly may also work for you rather than read.fwf.
> >>
> >> Also, there are posts regarding using other tools such a 'perl' or  
> >> 'cut' to
> >> prepocess the data
> >> before reading with R.  Searching the archives with those keywords  
> >> should
> >> help.
> >
> > I new user should not have to learn "perl","cut", "awk", etc simply  
> > to be able
> > to use R. Does not make sense to me.
> 
> Hi Anupam,
> 
> You'll get much better help here if you're not ill-tempered. This is  
> a group of extraordinarily helpful volunteers who owe you less than  
> you paid for the product.
> 
> Please consider saving your data in a way that will make it easier to  
> read into R. No program can read every dataset.
> _____________________________
> Professor Michael Kubovy
> University of Virginia
> Department of Psychology
> USPS:     P.O.Box 400400    Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400
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> WWW:    http://www.people.virginia.edu/~mk9y/


Also, if a user is new to R, it always helps if he or she uses a spreadsheet or another program/ set of scripts to first preprocess the data before reading them in R. These preprocessing might include simple steps such as naming and renaming columns, selecting which columns one needs in the dataset, etc. Then, once one is more familiar working with R, these can be accomplished within R relatively easily.  

/Arin Basu