R help - Aug 2010 - Read in a all-character file and specify field separator and records separator

Dear list

I used to use python or awk do preliminary process and then feed into
R. In some circumstances, the data transmission becomes quite a pain.
I am wondering if there is a convenient way to read in R text file
(not data, text file in common sense) and specify field separator and
records separator, so the whole work can be reduced to one-stop
shopping.
or simply, is there one simple way to read in the text file with each
row in a single column. scan(....sep="\n") does not work as expected.

Thanks

yong

On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 9:18 PM, Yong Wang <wangyong1 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Dear list
>
> I used to use python or awk do preliminary process and then feed into
> R. In some circumstances, the data transmission becomes quite a pain.
> I am wondering if there is a convenient way to read in R text file
> (not data, text file in common sense) and specify field separator and
> records separator, so the whole work can be reduced to one-stop
> shopping.
> or simply, is there one simple way to read in the text file with each
> row in a single column. scan(....sep="\n") does not work as
expected.
Do either of these do what you want?

readLines(con = file("example.txt", open = "r"))
read.table(file = "example.txt", sep = "\n")

Both throw a warning in a little text file I made, but both read each
line into one column.

Josh
>
> Thanks
>
> yong
>
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>


-- 
Joshua Wiley
Ph.D. Student, Health Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles
http://www.joshuawiley.com/

On Aug 30, 2010, at 12:18 AM, Yong Wang wrote:
> Dear list
>
> I used to use python or awk do preliminary process and then feed into
> R. In some circumstances, the data transmission becomes quite a pain.
> I am wondering if there is a convenient way to read in R text file
> (not data, text file in common sense) and specify field separator and
> records separator, so the whole work can be reduced to one-stop
> shopping.
> or simply, is there one simple way to read in the text file with each
> row in a single column. scan(....sep="\n") does not work as
expected.
>
You should not need to use sep=\n or any separator for a single column  
output. If what= is not specified you will just get a numeric vector,  
but if it's text, you need to specify "character".  Try the
obvious
modifications to this:

char.vec <- scan(file="/filepath/filename.ext",
what="character" )

Multiple columns require something like what=list("character",  
"numeric", "logical"), but you could do what the rest of us
use
because it's all  wrapped up with sensible defaults (with the possible  
exception of stringsAsFactors ) in the read.table function.

-- 
David.
.