R help - Jul 2019 - read.xls without row number, column numbers, or factors

Is there a way to use read.xls to copy a portion of a single row of an  
XLS spreadsheet to a list, without getting assigning row and column  
numbers, and, if the data consists of strings, without assigning levels?

Or alternatively, to take the single-row data frame generated by  
read.xls and convert it to a list, without row numbers, column  
numbers, or levels.

Right now I'm using version 3.2.3, on Linux Mint 18.  Can certainly  
upgrade if this would be desirable.


thanks for any assistance

George H

On Mon, 01 Jul 2019 20:13:34 -0400
asteya at mathnmaps.com wrote:
> Is there a way to use read.xls to copy a portion of a single row of
> an XLS spreadsheet to a list, without getting assigning row and
> column numbers, and, if the data consists of strings, without
> assigning levels?
If you mean the read.xls function from gdata package, it uses read.csv
to read the temporary CSV file produced from the XLS file and passes its
arguments using ..., so it should be possible to pass as.is = TRUE and
prevent factors from appearing.

It doesn't seem to be possible to prevent row and column names from
being produced (except passing header = F if your CSV doesn't have a
header).

The readxl[*] package offers somewhat saner defaults, so you might want
to try that, too.

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan

[*] https://readxl.tidyverse.org/

Converting a one-row data frame to a list is not difficult, but there
are several ways to represent the data as a list. Here is a
possibility:
> dta <- data.frame(t(LETTERS[1:10]), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
> dta
  X1 X2 X3 X4 X5 X6 X7 X8 X9 X10
1  A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I   J
> dta.lst <- as.list(unname(dta))
> str(dta.lst)
List of 10
 $ : chr "A"
 $ : chr "B"
 $ : chr "C"
 $ : chr "D"
 $ : chr "E"
 $ : chr "F"
 $ : chr "G"
 $ : chr "H"
 $ : chr "I"
 $ : chr "J"

--------------------------------
David L Carlson
Anthropology Department
Texas A&M University

On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 9:34 AM Ivan Krylov <krylov.r00t at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> On Mon, 01 Jul 2019 20:13:34 -0400
> asteya at mathnmaps.com wrote:
>
> > Is there a way to use read.xls to copy a portion of a single row of
> > an XLS spreadsheet to a list, without getting assigning row and
> > column numbers, and, if the data consists of strings, without
> > assigning levels?
>
> If you mean the read.xls function from gdata package, it uses read.csv
> to read the temporary CSV file produced from the XLS file and passes its
> arguments using ..., so it should be possible to pass as.is = TRUE and
> prevent factors from appearing.
>
> It doesn't seem to be possible to prevent row and column names from
> being produced (except passing header = F if your CSV doesn't have a
> header).
>
> The readxl[*] package offers somewhat saner defaults, so you might want
> to try that, too.
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Ivan
>
> [*]
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__readxl.tidyverse.org_&d=DwICAg&c=u6LDEWzohnDQ01ySGnxMzg&r=VAaHUElasUXjP9TzIcfIrXdkDpHnJBBZ9Q1u5LcXz9s&m=s6RiIjcvAhy9p3vCQ3IDY_pMKDIbJiJ19N3qoaMBdbo&s=wksjPQ0xfh5OAk0mgysq2vQ14kBIKPHysHxS9HLBvhQ&e>
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