R help - Dec 2001 - combine

hello there,

I ` m a newbie in R so please excuse my maybe simple question!

I have several (the number of the files changes) textfiles. Each
textfile contains one column with 3 rows (3 numerical values). I want to
combine each file with another file and create new textfiles which then
contain  2 columns with 3 rows. How can I do this in R? Do I have to
use  cbind? How Do I use cbind for my problem?
Instead of having several textfiles with one column and 3 rows I could
use one textfile with n columns with 3 rows. I don`t know which way is
better.

Thanks a lot for your help!
cheers,
Nando


_________________________________________________

   Nando Foppa  -  Remote Sensing Research Group

   Department of Geography

   University of Bern   Tel :  +41 (0)31 631 8020
   Hallerstr. 12            Fax :  +49 (0)89 2443 43780
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   Switzerland
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On 19.12.2001 9:26 Uhr, Nando Foppa wrote:
> I have several (the number of the files changes) textfiles. Each
> textfile contains one column with 3 rows (3 numerical values). I want to
> combine each file with another file and create new textfiles which then
> contain  2 columns with 3 rows. How can I do this in R? Do I have to
> use  cbind? How Do I use cbind for my problem?
Yes, use cbind() or data.frame(). You can e.g. do this (should work for most
well-behaved text files):

col1 <- scan("filename1")
col2 <- scan("filename2")
mydata <- data.frame(col1, col2)  # or the same with cbind(...)
write.table(mydata, file="filename3")

For more information on reading files into/from R, read the "R Data
Import/Export" manual which gets installed by default. See also
help(write.table), help(read.table), help(scan) for details on the functions
(such as specifying header rows, separators, N/A coding...).
> Instead of having several textfiles with one column and 3 rows I could
> use one textfile with n columns with 3 rows. I don`t know which way is
> better.
Depends on what you want to do with the data. For reading into R, both ways
work (for multi-column files, you'll want to use read.table() instead of
scan()).

Cheers

Kaspar



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Kaspar Pflugshaupt
Geobotanisches Institut
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