[R] Importing ASCII flat

[David Winsemius]

On May 17, 2012, at 8:17 AM, Richard Iles wrote:

> I am trying to import Indian National Sample Survey Data. It is  
> ASCII flat
> and an example is below
>
>  001460306025001117101011117111201*01*000000211 270104070204093
> 002460306025001117101011117111201*02*0000008011116104910519572 022   
> 2600
> 1150    30    55   170  4005  003460306025001117101011117111201*03*
> 0000111039204112  222
>
> Previous post don't seem to provide much help. I have an document  
> outlining
> the layout of the data, but don't know how to start. An example of the
> layout is that the values in bold indicate separate levels.Example of
> layout is below:
>
Your data layout was mangled by passage of html formating through  
various mailers. Looking at:

http://mospi.nic.in/Mospi_New/site/inner.aspx?status=4&menu_id=67

... I'm guessing you are showing only a tiny slice of the data  
specification.

>      Sl.No. Item Blk Item Col Len Byte Position Remarks

> 1 Common Items  33         1  - 33 Auto-duplicated
> 2 Level  2                34  - 35  "02" Generated
> 3 Filler 5                36  - 40 "00000" Generated
> 4 HHS Size 3 1 2          41  - 42
> 5 NIC Code(5-digit) 3 2 5 43  - 47
> 6 NCO Code(3-digit) 3 3 3 48  - 50
> 7 HHS type 3 4 1          51  -51
> 8 Religion 3 5 1          52  - 52

That was my best guess at what might have originally been the fixed  
format layout. You should look at:

?utils::read.fwf

If you can create a data.frame, dfrm,  from that data layout, then the  
most useful fields would be the names and the lengths. Perhaps this  
could work

read.fwf(file, widths=dfrm$Len, col.names= dfrm$Item)

> As is obvious, I am relatively new to R.

> Any constructive advice would be
> welcome.

PLEASE, please, please : Learn to post in plain text.

>
> Richard Iles
> -- 
> Economics Ph.D. student
> Delhi School of Economics (visiting)
> e: richard.iles at griffithuni.edu.au
>
> website: https://sites.google.com/a/griffithuni.edu.au/richard-iles/home 
> <https://sites.google.com/site/richardileshome/home>
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT