Hi:

On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 1:05 PM, Wil M Contreras Arbaje <
wil.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:

> While you are looking for a solution within R, it might be simpler to open
> your text file in almost any free text editor (Notepad++, Textwrangler,
> Smultron, vim come to mind), and do Replace all "' for ".


There's one problem with that solution: if the character string at the end
of the line is blank (i.e., ""), then your suggestion will leave one double
quote at the end of a line. Not good. What is needed is a gsub that takes
two double quotes plus a wild card character and replaces it with one double
quote and a wild card character. If you have an editor that can do that, let
me know...seriously. I suspect emacs can do this, but none of the basic
editors I know have that capability.

Dennis


>
>
> On Sep 12, 2010, at 3:58 PM, jim holtman wrote:
>
>  You can use the 'gsub' command to remove the quote marks.  You could
>> readLines/writeLines the file to clean it up with gsub before using
>> read.table on it so it can all be done within R.
>>
>> On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Eva Nordstrom <eva.nordstrom@yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I am using read.table to import a text file within R.
>>>
>>> There are several "errors" in my text file.  An "extra" quotation mark
>>> has
>>> inadvertently been included within a few text fields.
>>>
>>>
>>> e.g. for a pipe (|) delimited text file, I have something similar to
>>> this:
>>>
>>> 1|7|30| "dog"
>>> 2|6|25| ""cat"
>>> 3|4|20|""
>>> 4|5| 56| "mouse"
>>> 5|3|56| ""horse"
>>> 6|56| ""
>>>
>>> In the above example| there are extra quotation marks within the fields
>>> for cat
>>> and horse. (row 2 and row 5)
>>>
>>> e.g. "cat , "horse
>>>
>>> One solution is to simply edit the text file and remove the extra
>>> quotation
>>> mark.
>>>
>>> Is there a "good solution" I can implement form within R?
>>>
>>> I am OK with just importing the extra quotation marks and having nit show
>>> up as
>>> part of the text field within R.
>>>
>>> e.g,
>>> "cat
>>> "horse
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>       [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-help@r-project.org mailing list
>>> 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.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jim Holtman
>> Cincinnati, OH
>> +1 513 646 9390
>>
>> What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help@r-project.org mailing list
>> 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@r-project.org mailing list
> 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.
>

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