[R] Reading a file w/ two delimiters

[jim holtman]

It is pretty straightforward in R:

> x <- readLines(textConnection("sadf|asdf|asdf\tqwer|qwer|qwer\tzxcv|zxcv|zxfcgv"))
> closeAllConnections()
> # convert tabs to newlines
> x <- gsub("\t", "\n", x)
> # write out to a temp file and then read in as a data frame
> myFile <- tempfile()
> writeLines(x, con = myFile)
> x.df <- read.table(myFile, sep = "|")
>
>
> x.df
    V1   V2     V3
1 sadf asdf   asdf
2 qwer qwer   qwer
3 zxcv zxcv zxfcgv
>

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Langston, Jim
<Jim.Langston at compuware.com> wrote:
> 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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>
>>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
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>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>>>http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
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>>
>>
>>--
>>Paul Hiemstra, Ph.D.
>>Global Climate Division
>>Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI)
>>Wilhelminalaan 10 | 3732 GK | De Bilt | Kamer B 3.39
>>P.O. Box 201 | 3730 AE | De Bilt
>>tel: +31 30 2206 494
>>
>>http://intamap.geo.uu.nl/~paul
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>>
>
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>



-- 
Jim Holtman
Data Munger Guru

What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
Tell me what you want to do, not how you want to do it.