[R] reading in file with different row length

[David Winsemius]

On May 6, 2010, at 12:10 PM, Muhammad Rahiz wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have a file, say, test.txt, which contains the following  
> information. I'm trying to read in the file and specifying the  
> missing values as NA so that each column has the same number of rows.
>
> I've tried all sorts of manipulation but to no avail.
>
> r1 r2 r3
> 1   3
> 2   3
> 3 2 3
> 4 2 3
> 5 2 3
> 6 2 3
> 7 2
> 8 2
> 9 2 3
>

If you rplace the "," between the header labels with "\t" then  
read.fwf will do it:

 > read.fwf(textConnection("r1\tr2\tr3
+ 1   3
+ 2   3
+ 3 2 3
+ 4 2 3
+ 5 2 3
+ 6 2 3
+ 7 2
+ 8 2
+ 9 2 3"), header=TRUE, widths=c(1,-1,1,-1,1) )

   r1 r2 r3
1  1 NA  3
2  2 NA  3
3  3  2  3
4  4  2  3
5  5  2  3
6  6  2  3
7  7  2 NA
8  8  2 NA
9  9  2  3


> The output should be
>
> r1 r2 r3
> 1 NA 3
> 2 NA 3
> 3 2 3
> 4 2 3
> 5 2 3
> 6 2 3
> 7 2 NA
> 8 2 NA
> 9 2 3
>
> Muhammad
>
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David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT