[R] Reading a file w/ two delimiters

Langston, Jim Jim.Langston at compuware.com
Fri Nov 18 15:13:42 CET 2011


Thanks Paul,

That's the path I was marching down, I was hoping for something
a little cleaner, I do the same with Perl or Java.

Jim

On 11/18/11 8:35 AM, "Paul Hiemstra" <paul.hiemstra at knmi.nl> wrote:

>Hi Jim,
>
>You can read the text file using readLines. This puts each line in the
>file into an element of a list. Then you can go through the lines
>manually (e.g. using grep, sub, strsplit) and create your data.frame.
>
>cheers,
>Paul
>
>On 11/18/2011 12:37 PM, Langston, Jim wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've been scratching and poking, but basically, the file I need to read
>>has
>> two delimiters that I need to contend with. The first is that the file
>> contains
>> tabs (\t) , instead of newlines (\n), and the second is that the fields
>> have 
>> | for the seperators. I can easily do a read if I first convert the \t
>>to
>> \n
>> and then use read.table to get the file read with the | separator. But,
>> what I would really like to do, is do this all within R. I have a lot of
>> files
>> to read and do analysis on.
>>
>> I can read the data into a table using the \t has delimiter, but can't
>> figure
>> out how to take that table data and use the | for separation, I've look
>>at
>> string splits, etc. but haven't figured out how to split the whole
>>table.
>>
>> Any thoughts ? hints ?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Jim
>>
>>
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>
>-- 
>Paul Hiemstra, Ph.D.
>Global Climate Division
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