[R] how to import this kind of data?

[Brian Diggs]

On 9/17/2010 4:39 PM, Phil Spector wrote:
> Soyeon -
> I think scan() (combined with matrix and data.frame) is the easiest way.
> Suppose your text file is called "data.txt". Then
>
> data.frame(matrix(scan('data.txt'),byrow=TRUE,ncol=14))
>
> should give you what you want.
> - Phil Spector
> Statistical Computing Facility
> Department of Statistics
> UC Berkeley
> spector at stat.berkeley.edu

I agree Phil's solution is probably the easiest, but I thought I'd offer 
another solution anyway.  read.fwf can handle multi-line input files; 
the downside is that you have to specify the widths of the columns 
directly (which may change with the file).  Upside is that you could 
specify different data types for different columns if they were not all 
numeric and you can handle files that don't delimit with white space 
(neither of which is true for the example you gave).

read.fwf("data.txt", widths=list(c(10,7,7,3,8,8,7,8,5,7,5),c(10,7,5)))


> On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Soyeon Kim wrote:
>
>> Dear All,
>>
>> I am in a trouble with reading data.
>>
>> It is in txt file looking like this.
>>
>> 0.00632 18.00 2.310 0 0.5380 6.5750 65.20 4.0900 1 296.0 15.30
>> 396.90 4.98 24.00
>> 0.02731 0.00 7.070 0 0.4690 6.4210 78.90 4.9671 2 242.0 17.80
>> 396.90 9.14 21.60
>> 0.02729 0.00 7.070 0 0.4690 7.1850 61.10 4.9671 2 242.0 17.80
>> 392.83 4.03 34.70
>> 0.03237 0.00 2.180 0 0.4580 6.9980 45.80 6.0622 3 222.0 18.70
>> 394.63 2.94 33.40
>> 0.06905 0.00 2.180 0 0.4580 7.1470 54.20 6.0622 3 222.0 18.70
>> 396.90 5.33 36.20
>> 0.02985 0.00 2.180 0 0.4580 6.4300 58.70 6.0622 3 222.0 18.70
>> 394.12 5.21 28.70
>> 0.08829 12.50 7.870 0 0.5240 6.0120 66.60 5.5605 5 311.0 15.20
>> 395.60 12.43 22.90
>> 0.14455 12.50 7.870 0 0.5240 6.1720 96.10 5.9505 5 311.0 15.20
>> 396.90 19.15 27.10
>>
>> There are 14 variables. Therefore, the first of row should be at the
>> end of the second row.
>> So after importing the data, this should look like
>> v1 v2 v3 v4 v5 v6 v7 v8
>> v9 v10 v11 v12 v13 v14
>> 0.00632 18.00 2.310 0 0.5380 6.5750 65.20 4.0900 1 296.0
>> 15.30 396.90 4.98 24.00
>> and so on.
>>
>> How can import this kind of data into R?
>>
>> Thank you,
>>
>> ______________________________________________
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>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
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>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>

-- 
Brian S. Diggs, PhD
Senior Research Associate, Department of Surgery
Oregon Health & Science University