[R] [OT] (slightly) - OpenOffice Calc and text files

[Mike Marchywka]

----------------------------------------
> From: dwinsemius at comcast.net
> To: bschwab at anest.ufl.edu
> Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2010 14:52:21 -0400
> CC: r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R] [OT] (slightly) - OpenOffice Calc and text files
>
>
> On Oct 13, 2010, at 1:13 PM, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:
>
> > Hello all,
> >
> > I had a very strange looking problem that turned out to be due to
> > unexpected (by me at least) format changes to one of my data files.
> > We have a small lab study in which each run is represented by a row
> > in a tab-delimited file; each row identifies a repetition of the
> > experiment and associates it with some subjective measurements and
> > times from our notes that get used to index another file with lots
> > of automatically collected data. In short, nothing shocking.
> >
> > In a moment of weakness, I opened the file using (I think it's
> > version 3.2) of OpenOffice Calc to edit something that I had mangled
> > when I first entered it, saved it (apparently the mistake), and
> > reran my analysis code. The results were goofy, and the problem was
> > in my code that runs before R ever sees the data. That code was
> > confused by things that I would like to ensure don't happen again,
> > and I suspect that some of you might have thoughts on it.
> >
> > The problems specifically:
> >
> > (1) OO seems to be a little stingy about producing tab-delimited

> > filter and folks (presumably like us) saying that it deserves to be
> > a separate option.
>
> You have been little stingy yourself about describing what you did. I
> see no specifics about the actual data used as input nor the specific
> operations. I just opened an OO.o Calc workbook and dropped a
> character vector, "1969-12-31 23:59:50" copied from help(POSIXct) into



> > Have any of you found a nice (or at least predictable) way to use OO
> > Calc to edit files like this?
>
> I didn't do anything I thought was out of the ordinary and so cannot
> reproduce your problem. (This was on a Mac, but OO.o is probably going
> to behave the same across *NIX cultures.)
>
> --
> David
>
> > If it insists on thinking for me, I wish it would think in 24 hour
> > time and 4 digit years :)
>
> Is it possible that you have not done enough thinking for _it_?
>
> > I work on Linux, so Excel is off the table, but another spreadsheet
> > or text editor would be a viable option, as would configuration
> > changes to Calc.
> >
> > Bill

Probably instead of guessing and seeing how various things react, you
could go get a utility like octal dump or open in an editor that
has a hex mode and see what happened. This could be anything- crlf convention,
someone turned it to unicode, etc. On linux or cygwin I think you have
"od" available. Then of course, if you know what R likes, you can use
sed to fix it...