R help - Aug 2005 - reading "special" text files

hello,

assume you have a txt-file (sep="\t" or "") looking as
follows that you
want to read into a variable:

1	1	2			3
2	1	2	3		4
3	1	5	6	7	8

the result should look like this (e.g., in a data.frame):

1	1	2	3
2	1	2	3	4
3	1	5	6	7	8

is there any way to do so?

thanks in advance,
jan

Jan Wiener wrote:
> hello,
> 
> assume you have a txt-file (sep="\t" or "") looking as
follows that you
> want to read into a variable:
> 
> 1	1	2			3
> 2	1	2	3		4
> 3	1	5	6	7	8
> 
> the result should look like this (e.g., in a data.frame):
> 
> 1	1	2	3
> 2	1	2	3	4
> 3	1	5	6	7	8
> 
> is there any way to do so?
Yes, with e.g. sep="\t" and sep=" " the number of separators
is taken
into account.
No, with sep="" the separator is *any* white space.


Uwe Ligges

> thanks in advance,
> jan
> 
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On Wed, 24 Aug 2005, Jan Wiener wrote:
> hello,
>
> assume you have a txt-file (sep="\t" or "") looking as
follows that you
> want to read into a variable:
Into a variable or a data frame?
> 1	1	2			3
> 2	1	2	3		4
> 3	1	5	6	7	8
>
> the result should look like this (e.g., in a data.frame):
With no column names? Not possible.
> 1	1	2	3
> 2	1	2	3	4
> 3	1	5	6	7	8
>
> is there any way to do so?
I think we need to know what the structure here is.  At a guess, the 
separator is multiple tabs as in the example.  In that case
> read.table("foo", header=FALSE, fill = TRUE)
   V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6
1  1  1  2  3 NA NA
2  2  1  2  3  4 NA
3  3  1  5  6  7  8

or
> read.table("foo", header=FALSE, fill = TRUE, row.names=1)
   V2 V3 V4 V5 V6
1  1  2  3 NA NA
2  1  2  3  4 NA
3  1  5  6  7  8

does in essence what you want.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595