[R] Reading then transposing from file

[David Winsemius]

On Mar 17, 2012, at 5:27 AM, diond wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm an R beginner and I'm struggling with what should be a  
> rudimentary task.
>
> My data is along these lines:
>
> ID name1 name2 name3 name4
> Class 0 1 0 2
> Var1 A B C A
> Var2 B C C A
> Var3 C A B A
>
> etc.
>
> I'm using the following:
>
> foo <- data.frame(t(read.table("file", header=FALSE)))
>
> but of course now it's not using ID, Class, etc. as column names.

The columns are  going to be ID, name1, name2, name3, name4.

Why not do this:

foo <- t(read.table(text=" name1 name2 name3 name4
  Class 0 1 0 2
  Var1 A B C A
  Var2 B C C A
  Var3 C A B A", header=TRUE))
       Class Var1 Var2 Var3
name1 "0"   "A"  "B"  "C"
name2 "1"   "B"  "C"  "A"
name3 "0"   "C"  "C"  "B"
name4 "2"   "A"  "A"  "A"

Two changes: removed the "ID" column name which had the effect of  
turning the "names" into rownames during input and used header=TRUE to  
"separate" the "names" from the data. You may need to coerce to a  
data.frame and you name need to coerce the Class variable to  
numeric ,  since the result is now a character matrix,

>
> As you can imagine, I'd like to be able to use, say, foo$Var2 or foo 
> $ID.

You could have used foo[ ID=="Var2", ] but that would really be a  
painful approach , since you would get none of the usual help from R  
functions that expect data to be column oriented
>
> What's the best way to achieve this?
>
> Dion
>
> --
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>
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David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT