R help - Mar 2005 - reading in vectors from text files

Hello,

I am trying to read in a file of data using read.table(), in which the
data in one column is vectors.

The format of the file is as follows -


FirstName	LastName	no.Children		children.ages
Sally		James		3			c(3,5,7)
John		Smith		2			c(13,16)
Betsy		Harold	6			c(2,5,8,12,15,17)


How do I specify that the children.ages column contains vector data, and
that each vector is of a different length when reading in this text
file?

Thanks in advance,
Rashmi

Rashmi Mathur wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am trying to read in a file of data using read.table(), in which the
> data in one column is vectors.
> 
> The format of the file is as follows -
> 
> 
> FirstName	LastName	no.Children		children.ages
> Sally		James		3			c(3,5,7)
> John		Smith		2			c(13,16)
> Betsy		Harold	6			c(2,5,8,12,15,17)
> 
> 
> How do I specify that the children.ages column contains vector data, and
> that each vector is of a different length when reading in this text
> file?
You might want to read the column as character, parse it afterwards, and 
convert your data structure into a list which seems more appropriate to 
represent the data.

Uwe Ligges

> Thanks in advance,
> Rashmi
> 
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