R help - May 2010 - any function in R similar to the "scan" function in SAS?

I am wondering if there is any function in R that is similar to the
"scan"
function in SAS.
I have a data.frame which has two columns as the following:
one   two
1      2
3      4
5      6

I used the "paste" function to create the third column: three <-
paste(one,'-',two,sep="")
so the data.frame is like this now:
one   two   three
1      2       1-2
3      4       3-4
5      6       5-6

My question is, is there any function in R that can do the opposite thing to
what "paste" does?
suppose I only have the third column "three" now, and I want to get
the
first and second columns. If in SAS, I can do the following:
one = scan(three,1,'-')
two = scan(three,-1,'-')

How can I do this in R?

thank you,

karena
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karena wrote:
> I am wondering if there is any function in R that is similar to the
"scan"
> function in SAS.
> I have a data.frame which has two columns as the following:
> one   two
> 1      2
> 3      4
> 5      6
> 
> I used the "paste" function to create the third column: three
<-
> paste(one,'-',two,sep="")
> so the data.frame is like this now:
> one   two   three
> 1      2       1-2
> 3      4       3-4
> 5      6       5-6
> 
> My question is, is there any function in R that can do the opposite thing
to
> what "paste" does?
> suppose I only have the third column "three" now, and I want to
get the
> first and second columns. If in SAS, I can do the following:
> one = scan(three,1,'-')
> two = scan(three,-1,'-')
> 
> How can I do this in R?
?strsplit

Karena -
    You can use strsplit combined with sapply to do what
you want:
> three = c('1-2','3-4','5-6')
> ss = strsplit(three,'-')
> one = sapply(ss,function(x)x[1])
> two = sapply(ss,function(x)x[2])
> one
[1] "1" "3" "5"
> two
[1] "2" "4" "6"

You might want to use as.numeric to convert them back
to numbers, since SAS doesn't care about that particular
detail.
 					- Phil Spector
 					 Statistical Computing Facility
 					 Department of Statistics
 					 UC Berkeley
 					 spector at stat.berkeley.edu


On Wed, 5 May 2010, karena wrote:
>
> I am wondering if there is any function in R that is similar to the
"scan"
> function in SAS.
> I have a data.frame which has two columns as the following:
> one   two
> 1      2
> 3      4
> 5      6
>
> I used the "paste" function to create the third column: three
<-
> paste(one,'-',two,sep="")
> so the data.frame is like this now:
> one   two   three
> 1      2       1-2
> 3      4       3-4
> 5      6       5-6
>
> My question is, is there any function in R that can do the opposite thing
to
> what "paste" does?
> suppose I only have the third column "three" now, and I want to
get the
> first and second columns. If in SAS, I can do the following:
> one = scan(three,1,'-')
> two = scan(three,-1,'-')
>
> How can I do this in R?
>
> thank you,
>
> karena
> -- 
> View this message in context:
http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/any-function-in-R-similar-to-the-scan-function-in-SAS-tp2131264p2131264.html
> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at 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.
>

thank you guys very much!
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Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

You can read from a character vector as if it were a file like this:
> x <- c("1-2", "3-4", "5-6")
> read.table(textConnection(x), sep = "-", col.names =
c("one", "two"))
  one two
1   1   2
2   3   4
3   5   6


On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 12:45 PM, karena <dr.jzhou at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> I am wondering if there is any function in R that is similar to the
"scan"
> function in SAS.
> I have a data.frame which has two columns as the following:
> one ? two
> 1 ? ? ?2
> 3 ? ? ?4
> 5 ? ? ?6
>
> I used the "paste" function to create the third column: three
<-
> paste(one,'-',two,sep="")
> so the data.frame is like this now:
> one ? two ? three
> 1 ? ? ?2 ? ? ? 1-2
> 3 ? ? ?4 ? ? ? 3-4
> 5 ? ? ?6 ? ? ? 5-6
>
> My question is, is there any function in R that can do the opposite thing
to
> what "paste" does?
> suppose I only have the third column "three" now, and I want to
get the
> first and second columns. If in SAS, I can do the following:
> one = scan(three,1,'-')
> two = scan(three,-1,'-')
>
> How can I do this in R?
>
> thank you,
>
> karena
> --
> View this message in context:
http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/any-function-in-R-similar-to-the-scan-function-in-SAS-tp2131264p2131264.html
> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at 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.
>