[R] Trouble pulling data from a messy ACII file...

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Its not clear what the result would be but you may be able to use read.table.
Try this:


Lines <- "19 c:/data/WF-100/2008/20080911/trk/20080911.013115.007.17.txt
10 s   name of program that wrote this file trkplt   name of program that
wrote this file
10 GORDON   machine that generated this file   machine that generated this
file
10     3.7 version of program
10     3.6 version of this data file
10    5.81 version of Universal Library
10 20081121.145730 when this file was written
10 Windows_XP   operating system used   operating system used
*
*       radar characteristics
11 WF-100
11 20000000  A/D rate, samples/second
11 7.5  bin width, m
11 800  nominal PRF, Hz
11  0.25  nominal pulse width, microsec
11 0  tuning, volts
11 3.19779  nominal wave length, cm"

DF <- read.table(textConnection(Lines), fill = TRUE)
DF2 <- with(DF, na.omit(data.frame(V1, V2 = as.numeric(V2), V3 =
do.call(paste, DF[-(1:2)]))))

You may need to remove the na.omit if you really do need those rows
and make other
changes but that at least gives the idea.


On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 2:03 PM, Titan8883 <jplaney at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I am a new graduate student who is also new to R. I am ok with the basics,
> but the problem I am having right now seems beyond what I can do..so I am
> looking for advice. I am trying to pull data from flat ASCII files, but they
> do not have a "nice" structure so a simple "read.table" doesn't work. An
> example first half of a data file is below:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 19 c:/data/WF-100/2008/20080911/trk/20080911.013115.007.17.txt
> 10 s   name of program that wrote this file trkplt   name of program that
> wrote this file
> 10 GORDON   machine that generated this file   machine that generated this
> file
> 10     3.7 version of program
> 10     3.6 version of this data file
> 10    5.81 version of Universal Library
> 10 20081121.145730 when this file was written
> 10 Windows_XP   operating system used   operating system used
> *
> *       radar characteristics
> 11 WF-100
> 11 20000000  A/D rate, samples/second
> 11 7.5  bin width, m
> 11 800  nominal PRF, Hz
> 11  0.25  nominal pulse width, microsec
> 11 0  tuning, volts
> 11 3.19779  nominal wave length, cm
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ..the file goes on from there...
>
> How would I go about getting this data into some kind of useful format? This
> is one of about 1000 files I will need to go through. I would ideally like
> to get these into a format with each data file as a row with columns for the
> various values with the description text removed(version of program, file
> version, tuning volts, etc...).
>
> I'm not looking for a cut and paste answer, but perhaps some direction on
> where I should start. I have only done basic .csv, table, and line inputs up
> until now.
>
> Thanks for any advice
> --
> View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Trouble-pulling-data-from-a-messy-ACII-file...-tp21059239p21059239.html
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>
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