R help - Apr 2009 - Controlling widths in write.fwf()

Is there a way to handle the widths of values being written to a file
using wrtite.fwf() ?

For example, I used read.fwf(file, width.vector) to read a file. After
making the necessary data manipulation, I want to write the data to a
new file in the same width.vector format. Is there a way to specify
this?

Thanks in Advance
Aparna  

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

On 14/04/2009 7:28 PM, Vemuri, Aparna wrote:
> Is there a way to handle the widths of values being written to a file
> using wrtite.fwf() ?
> 
> For example, I used read.fwf(file, width.vector) to read a file. After
> making the necessary data manipulation, I want to write the data to a
> new file in the same width.vector format. Is there a way to specify
> this?
There is no write.fwf function, but you can use sprintf() to convert 
things to strings and writeLines to write those strings.  There's a lot 
of flexibility in the formats allowed; see the man page.

Duncan Murdoch

Hi Aparna, you could always use the write.table function and set  
sep="". This will put all of your data into a sort of
"fixed-width"
column depending on what you specify to separate the values. See basic  
example below:

x<-matrix(nrow=2, ncol=2, c(1,2,3,4))
write.table(x, "/Users/morse07/Desktop/x.txt", sep="",  
col.names=FALSE, row.names=FALSE)

Note that any spaces you insert between the "" after the sep command  
will insert 1 fixed-width column per space in your file.

Hope that helps,
Brendan


On Apr 14, 2009, at 7:28 PM, Vemuri, Aparna wrote:
> Is there a way to handle the widths of values being written to a file
> using wrtite.fwf() ?
>
> For example, I used read.fwf(file, width.vector) to read a file. After
> making the necessary data manipulation, I want to write the data to a
> new file in the same width.vector format. Is there a way to specify
> this?
>
> Thanks in Advance
> Aparna
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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