[R] Replacing text with a carriage return

[Rui Barradas]

Hello,

Instead of replacing "record_start" with newlines, you can split the 
string by it. And use 'gsub' to make it prettier.


x <- readLines("test.txt")
x
y <- gsub("\"", "", x)  # remove the double quotes
y <- unlist(strsplit(y, "record_start,"))  # do the split, with comma
# remove leading blanks and trailing blanks/commas
y <- gsub("^[[:blank:]]|[[:blank:]]$|,[[:blank:]]$", "", y)
# see the result and save it to file
y
writeLines(text=y, con="result.txt")


Hope this helps,

Rui Barradas

Em 25-06-2012 10:17, Thomas escreveu:
> I have a comma separated data file with no carriage returns and what I'd
> like to do is
>
> 1. read the data as a block text
> 2. search for the string that starts each record "record_start", and
> replace this with a carriage return. Replace will do, or just add a
> carriage return before it. The string is the same for each record, but
> it is enclosed in double quote marks in the file.
> 3. Write the results out as a csv file.
>
> Let's say file.text looked like this:
> "record_start", "data item 1", "data item 2", "record_start", "data item
> 3", "data item 4"
> and I wanted:
> ,"data item 1", "data item 2",
> "data item 3", "data item 4"
>
> text <- readLines("file.txt",encoding="UTF-8")
> text <- gsub("record_start", "/n", text)
> write.csv(text, "file2.csv")
>
> This gives me "/n" in the text file, enclosed in the double quotes that
> were there in the file around record_start already. Even if the double
> quotes weren't there though, I'm still not sure this would work. (BTW, I
> can live with the first incorrect comma in the output file because I can
> just remove it manually.)
> Can anyone suggest a solution?
> Thank you,
> Thomas Chesney
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