[R] Using sqldf() to read in .fwf files

[Doran, Harold]

I am learning to use sqldf() to read in very large fixed width files that otherwise do not work efficiently with read.fwf. I found the following example online and have worked with this in various ways to read in the data

cat("1 8.3
210.3
319.0
416.0
515.6
719.8
", file = "fixed")

fixed <- file("fixed")
sqldf("select substr(V1, 1, 1) f1, substr(V1, 2, 4) f2 from fixed")

I then applied this to my real world data problem though it yields the following error message and I am not sure how to interpret this.

dor <- file("dor")
> sqldf("select substr(V1, 1, 1) f1, substr(V1, 2, 4) f2 from dor")
Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  :
  line 1 did not have 6 elements

Looking at my .fwf. data in a text editor shows the data are structured as I would expect. In fact, I can read in the first few lines of the file using read.fwf and the data are as I would expect after being read into R.

Thanks,
Harold


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