[R] Reading a file w/ two delimiters

[David Winsemius]

On Nov 18, 2011, at 9:13 AM, Langston, Jim 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.

 > tesfil <- "aa|bb|cc\tdd|ee|ff\t"

 > read.table(textConnection(gsub("\\\t", "\n", scan(
                textConnection(tesfil), # substitute your file here
                what="character")) ), sep="|")
Read 2 items
   V1 V2 V3
1 aa bb cc
2 dd ee ff

>
> 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
>> 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
>>
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>>
>
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David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT