[R] how to separate string from numbers in a large txt file

[Michael Boulineau]

OK. So, I named the object test and then checked the 6347th item

> test <- readLines ("hangouts-conversation.txt)
> test [6347]
[1] "2016-10-21 10:56:37 <John Doe> Admit#8242"

Perhaps where it was getting screwed up is, since the end of this is a
number (8242), then, given that there's no space between the number
and what ought to be the next row, R didn't know where to draw the
line. Sure enough, it looks like this when I go to the original file
and control f "#8242"

2016-10-21 10:35:36 <Jane Doe> What's your login
2016-10-21 10:56:29 <John Doe> John_Doe
2016-10-21 10:56:37 <John Doe> Admit#8242
2016-10-21 11:00:13 <Jane Doe> Okay so you have a discussion

Again, it doesn't look like that in the file. Gmail automatically
formats it like that when I paste it in. More to the point, it looks
like

2016-10-21 10:35:36 <Jane Doe> What's your login2016-10-21 10:56:29
<John Doe> John_Doe2016-10-21 10:56:37 <John Doe> Admit#82422016-10-21
11:00:13 <Jane Doe> Okay so you have a discussion

Notice Admit#82422016. So there's that.

Then I built object test2.

test2 <- sub("^(.{10}) (.{8}) (<.+>) (.+$)", "//1,//2,//3,//4", test)

This worked for 84 lines, then this happened.

> test2 [84]
[1] "2016-06-28 21:12:43 *** John Doe ended a video chat"
> test2 [85]
[1] "//1,//2,//3,//4"
> test [85]
[1] "2016-07-01 02:50:35 <John Doe> hey"

Notice how I toggled back and forth between test and test2 there. So,
whatever happened with the regex, it happened in the switch from 84 to
85, I guess. It went on like

[990] "//1,//2,//3,//4"
 [991] "//1,//2,//3,//4"
 [992] "//1,//2,//3,//4"
 [993] "//1,//2,//3,//4"
 [994] "//1,//2,//3,//4"
 [995] "//1,//2,//3,//4"
 [996] "//1,//2,//3,//4"
 [997] "//1,//2,//3,//4"
 [998] "//1,//2,//3,//4"
 [999] "//1,//2,//3,//4"
[1000] "//1,//2,//3,//4"

up until line 1000, then I reached max.print.

Michael

On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 1:05 PM David Winsemius <dwinsemius using comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> On 5/16/19 12:30 PM, Michael Boulineau wrote:
> > Thanks for this tip on etiquette, David. I will be sure and not do that again.
> >
> > I tried the read.fwf from the foreign package, with a code like this:
> >
> >   d <- read.fwf("hangouts-conversation.txt",
> >                  widths= c(10,10,20,40),
> >                  col.names=c("date","time","person","comment"),
> >                  strip.white=TRUE)
> >
> > But it threw this error:
> >
> > Error in scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = quote, dec = dec,  :
> >    line 6347 did not have 4 elements
>
>
> So what does line 6347 look like? (Use `readLines` and print it out.)
>
> >
> > Interestingly, though, the error only happened when I increased the
> > width size. But I had to increase the size, or else I couldn't "see"
> > anything.  The comment was so small that nothing was being captured by
> > the size of the column. so to speak.
> >
> > It seems like what's throwing me is that there's no comma that
> > demarcates the end of the text proper. For example:
>
> Not sure why you thought there should be a comma. Lines usually end
> with  <cr> and or a <lf>.
>
>
> Once you have the raw text in a character vector from `readLines` named,
> say, 'chrvec', then you could selectively substitute commas for spaces
> with regex. (Now that you no longer desire to remove the dates and times.)
>
> sub("^(.{10}) (.{8}) (<.+>) (.+$)", "//1,//2,//3,//4", chrvec)
>
> This will not do any replacements when the pattern is not matched. See
> this test:
>
>
>  > newvec <- sub("^(.{10}) (.{8}) (<.+>) (.+$)", "\\1,\\2,\\3,\\4", chrvec)
>  > newvec
>   [1] "2016-07-01,02:50:35,<john>,hey"
>   [2] "2016-07-01,02:51:26,<jane>,waiting for plane to Edinburgh"
>   [3] "2016-07-01,02:51:45,<john>,thinking about my boo"
>   [4] "2016-07-01,02:52:07,<jane>,nothing crappy has happened, not really"
>   [5] "2016-07-01,02:52:20,<john>,plane went by pretty fast, didn't sleep"
>   [6] "2016-07-01,02:54:08,<jane>,no idea what time it is or where I am
> really"
>   [7] "2016-07-01,02:54:17,<john>,just know it's london"
>   [8] "2016-07-01,02:56:44,<jane>,you are probably asleep"
>   [9] "2016-07-01,02:58:45,<jane>,I hope fish was fishy in a good eay"
> [10] "2016-07-01 02:58:56 <jone>"
> [11] "2016-07-01 02:59:34 <jane>"
> [12] "2016-07-01,03:02:48,<john>,British security is a little more
> rigorous..."
>
>
> You should probably remove the "empty comment" lines.
>
>
> --
>
> David.
>
> >
> > 2016-07-01 15:34:30 <John Doe> Lame. We were in a starbucks2016-07-01
> > 15:35:02 <Jane Doe> Hmm that's interesting2016-07-01 15:35:09 <Jane
> > Doe> You must want coffees2016-07-01 15:35:25 <John Doe> There was
> > lots of Starbucks in my day2016-07-01 15:35:47
> >
> > It was interesting, too, when I pasted the text into the email, it
> > self-formatted into the way I wanted it to look. I had to manually
> > make it look like it does above, since that's the way that it looks in
> > the txt file. I wonder if it's being organized by XML or something.
> >
> > Anyways, There's always a space between the two sideways carrots, just
> > like there is right now: <John Doe> See. Space. And there's always a
> > space between the data and time. Like this. 2016-07-01 15:34:30 See.
> > Space. But there's never a space between the end of the comment and
> > the next date. Like this: We were in a starbucks2016-07-01 15:35:02
> > See. starbucks and 2016 are smooshed together.
> >
> > This code is also on the table right now too.
> >
> > a <- read.table("E:/working
> > directory/-189/hangouts-conversation2.txt", quote="\"",
> > comment.char="", fill=TRUE)
> >
> > h<-cbind(hangouts.conversation2[,1:2],hangouts.conversation2[,3:5],hangouts.conversation2[,6:9])
> >
> > aa<-gsub("[^[:digit:]]","",h)
> > my.data.num <- as.numeric(str_extract(h, "[0-9]+"))
> >
> > Those last lines are a work in progress. I wish I could import a
> > picture of what it looks like when it's translated into a data frame.
> > The fill=TRUE helped to get the data in table that kind of sort of
> > works, but the comments keep bleeding into the data and time column.
> > It's like
> >
> > 2016-07-01 15:59:17 <Jane Doe> Seriously I've never been
> > over               there
> > 2016-07-01 15:59:27 <Jane Doe> It confuses me :(
> >
> > And then, maybe, the "seriously" will be in a column all to itself, as
> > will be the "I've'"and the "never" etc.
> >
> > I will use a regular expression if I have to, but it would be nice to
> > keep the dates and times on there. Originally, I thought they were
> > meaningless, but I've since changed my mind on that count. The time of
> > day isn't so important. But, especially since, say, Gmail itself knows
> > how to quickly recognize what it is, I know it can be done. I know
> > this data has structure to it.
> >
> > Michael
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 8:47 PM David Winsemius <dwinsemius using comcast.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 5/15/19 4:07 PM, Michael Boulineau wrote:
> >>> I have a wild and crazy text file, the head of which looks like this:
> >>>
> >>> 2016-07-01 02:50:35 <john> hey
> >>> 2016-07-01 02:51:26 <jane> waiting for plane to Edinburgh
> >>> 2016-07-01 02:51:45 <john> thinking about my boo
> >>> 2016-07-01 02:52:07 <jane> nothing crappy has happened, not really
> >>> 2016-07-01 02:52:20 <john> plane went by pretty fast, didn't sleep
> >>> 2016-07-01 02:54:08 <jane> no idea what time it is or where I am really
> >>> 2016-07-01 02:54:17 <john> just know it's london
> >>> 2016-07-01 02:56:44 <jane> you are probably asleep
> >>> 2016-07-01 02:58:45 <jane> I hope fish was fishy in a good eay
> >>> 2016-07-01 02:58:56 <jone>
> >>> 2016-07-01 02:59:34 <jane>
> >>> 2016-07-01 03:02:48 <john> British security is a little more rigorous...
> >> Looks entirely not-"crazy". Typical log file format.
> >>
> >> Two possibilities: 1) Use `read.fwf` from pkg foreign; 2) Use regex
> >> (i.e. the sub-function) to strip everything up to the "<". Read
> >> `?regex`. Since that's not a metacharacters you could use a pattern
> >> ".+<" and replace with "".
> >>
> >> And do read the Posting Guide. Cross-posting to StackOverflow and Rhelp,
> >> at least within hours of each, is considered poor manners.
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >>
> >> David.
> >>
> >>> It goes on for a while. It's a big file. But I feel like it's going to
> >>> be difficult to annotate with the coreNLP library or package. I'm
> >>> doing natural language processing. In other words, I'm curious as to
> >>> how I would shave off the dates, that is, to make it look like:
> >>>
> >>> <john> hey
> >>> <jane> waiting for plane to Edinburgh
> >>>    <john> thinking about my boo
> >>> <jane> nothing crappy has happened, not really
> >>> <john> plane went by pretty fast, didn't sleep
> >>> <jane> no idea what time it is or where I am really
> >>> <john> just know it's london
> >>> <jane> you are probably asleep
> >>> <jane> I hope fish was fishy in a good eay
> >>>    <jone>
> >>> <jane>
> >>> <john> British security is a little more rigorous...
> >>>
> >>> To be clear, then, I'm trying to clean a large text file by writing a
> >>> regular expression? such that I create a new object with no numbers or
> >>> dates.
> >>>
> >>> Michael
> >>>
> >>> ______________________________________________
> >>> R-help using 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.
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help using 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.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help using 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.