[R] Reading a tab delimted file of varying length using read.table

[Pradeep Bisht]

A Big thanks to everyone to help me solve this problem .
My bad I assumed the file is delimited by tab which it was not . Its a
fixed width file and the code that Uwe gave is just perfect .
It was cleaver to skip the first row since the delimiter cannot be
specified in this case .I added few more things to it and got the desired
solution .
Here is the code

​​
url <- "http://data.princeton.edu/wws509/datasets/divorce.dat"
widths <- c(9, 13, 10, 8, 10, 6)
f5 <- read.fwf(url, widths = widths,
               skip = 1,
               nrow=10,
               strip.white = TRUE,
               col.names=c("id","heduc","heblack","mixed","years","div"),
               colClasses = c("numeric", "character",
"character","character", "double", "character" )
               )

Regards
Pradeep Singh

On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 4:48 PM, Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de
> wrote:

> This is not a tab delimited file (as you apparently assume given the
> code), but a fixed width format, hence I'd try:
>
> url <- "http://data.princeton.edu/wws509/datasets/divorce.dat"
> widths <- c(9, 13, 10, 8, 10, 6)
> f5 <- read.fwf(url, widths = widths, skip = 1, strip.white = TRUE)
>
> names(f5) <- as.character(unlist(read.fwf(url, widths = widths,
> strip.white=TRUE, n=1)))
>
> Not sure why reading it simply with header=TRUE des not work, but no time
> to investiagte this now.
>
> Best,
> Uwe Ligges
>
>
>
> On 17.01.2016 16:31, Pradeep Bisht wrote:
>
>> Hello Experts  ,
>>
>> Being a SAS developer I am finding it difficult to perform some of data
>> cleaning in R that are quite easy to perform in SAS .
>>
>> I have been trying to read a .dat file and after a lot of attempts have
>> failed to find a solution . Maybe R doesn't have the functionality right
>> now or I am not looking in the right place . Here is my code .
>>
>> f5=read.table("http://data.princeton.edu/wws509/datasets/divorce.dat
>> <
>> http://www.linkedin.com/redir/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdata%2Eprinceton%2Eedu%2Fwws509%2Fdatasets%2Fdivorce%2Edat&urlhash=GVbR&_t=tracking_anet
>> >
>> ",
>> header=T,
>> sep="\t",
>> colClasses = c("numeric", "character", "character","character", "double",
>> "character" ) )
>> The error i get i
>> ​s​
>> this .
>> Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,
>> :
>> scan() expected 'a real', got '912-15yearsNoNo10.546No'
>>
>> Also does read.table always calls scan in background to do its job . If so
>> why use read.table in first place .
>>
>> Pradeep​
>>
>>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>>

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]