[R] How to fetch specific part from a number of Text files? [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Augusto.Sanabria at ga.gov.au]

Megh,

You can capture all your external files into R using:

All_files <- dir(pattern="txt")
Then read files one by one and insert the contents from section 2,
say, in line 10, to section 3, say in line 40, into file "cont":
no_files <- length(All_files)
cont <- vector("list",no_files)
for(i in 1:no_files)cont[[i]] <- read.csv(files[i],skip=10,nrows=40)

Now the 1000 files "cont" contain 'section 2' of all your external files.

This is an effective but not very elegant way to do what you want.

Hope it helps,

Augusto


--------------------------------------------
Augusto Sanabria. MSc, PhD.
Mathematical Modeller
Risk & Impact Analysis Group
Geospatial & Earth Monitoring Division
Geoscience Australia (www.ga.gov.au)
Cnr. Jerrabomberra Av. & Hindmarsh Dr.
Symonston ACT 2601
Ph. (02) 6249-9155






-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of megh
Sent: Monday, 15 December 2008 8:54
To: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: [R] How to fetch specific part from a number of Text files?



Hi all,

I my c: drive I have possibly 1,000 notepad files, with .txt extension. They are named as the dates on which they were saved i.e. 1st file name is "Volume_4-18-2008", 2nd one is "Volume_4-21-2008", 3rd one "Volume_4-22-2008" and so on............

Also, content of each file are in same format like :

******** content of 1st file *************
section : 1
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------
section : 2
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------
section : 3
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------
section : 4
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------
-----       ---------      ----------    -----------

Here all files have 4-sections, just like shown here but contents within each section (i.e. dashed line here) differs file to file.

What I have to do is I have to fetch contents of "section : 2" from each file and then save it to a R-object, matrix of list for further analysis.

Can you ppl please tell me how to do that?

Thanks and regards,
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