[R] split character line into rows

Sarah Goslee
Mon, 17 Dec 2012 16:23:50 -0000

Certainly.

But you'd be better advised to use dput(head(yourdata, 20)) to provide
data, since we don't actually know what's in your data after it has
passed through print, copy, and email. How you got it into R may also
be relevant.

Also, I don't see how you get from the given data to the desired results:

Given data, first line with date:

[1] 2010.12.26 00:00:52    688,88          11,69     43,00


First line of result:
2010.12.26 00:01:52     555     11.67     44


I'm guessing that there might be tab characters in the data as
separators, or are they spaces (this is why we need dput), and you
want the commas as decimal marks rather than separators?

If it were me, I'd extract the non-date rows outside of R using grep,
then use read.csv2() to import it. But you can achieve much the same
effect using grep() within R to get the rows with dates, then
strsplit() to divide them into separate elements. Assuming that these
are character vectors, that is.

For actual working code, you need to provide actual working data.

Sarah

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 7:04 AM, Simonas Kecorius <simolas2008 at
gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey R users,
>
> suppose we have data:
>
> [1] 2010.12.26 00:00:52    688,88          11,69     43,00
>   [2] 11,69     43,00
>   [3] 11,69     43,00
>   [4] 11,69     43,00
>   [5] 11,69     43,00
>   [6] 11,69     43,00
>   [7] 11,69     43,00
>   [8] 11,69     43,00
>   [9] 11,69     43,00
>  [10] 11,69     43,00
>  [11] 11,69     43,00
>  [12] 11,69     43,00
>  [13] 11,69     43,00
>  [14] 11,69     43,00
>  [15] 11,69     43,00
>  [16] 11,69     43,00
>  [17] 11,69     43,00
>  [18] 11,69     43,00
>  [19] 11,69     43,00
>  [20] 11,69     43,00
>  [21] 11,69     43,00
>  [22] 11,69     43,00
>  [23] 11,69     43,00
>  [24] 11,69     43,00
>  [25] 11,69     43,00
>  [26] 11,69     43,00
>  [27] 11,69     43,00
>  [28] 11,69     43,00
>  [29] 11,69     43,00
>  [30] 11,69     43,00
>  [31] 11,69     43,00
>  [32] 11,69     43,00
>  [33] 11,69     43,00
>  [34] 11,69     43,00
>  [35] 11,69     43,00
>  [36] 11,69     43,00
>  [37] 11,69     43,00
>  [38] 11,69     43,00
>  [39] 11,69     43,00
>  [40] 11,69     43,00
>  [41] 11,69     43,00
>  [42] 11,69     43,00
>  [43] 11,69     43,00
>  [44] 11,69     43,00
>  [45] 11,69     43,00
>  [46] 11,69     43,00
>  [47] 11,69     43,00
>  [48] 11,69     43,00
>  [49] 11,69     43,00
>  [50] 11,69     43,00
>  [51] 11,69     43,00
>  [52] 11,69     43,00
>  [53] 11,69     43,00
>  [54] 11,69     43,00
>  [55] 11,69     43,00
>  [56] 11,69     43,00
>  [57] 11,69     43,00
>  [58] 11,69     43,00
>  [59] 11,69     43,00
>  [60] 11,69     43,00
>  [61] 2010.12.26 00:01:52    696,19          11,69     43,00
>  [62] 11,69     43,00
>  [63] 11,69     43,00
>  [64] 11,69     43,00
>  [65] 11,69     43,00
>  [66] 11,69     43,00
> ..................................... etc.
>
> Is there a way to split data into date column, V2, V3 and V4 columns and
> erase those lines without date, so that data would look like that:
>
> date                             V2       V3       V4
> 2010.12.26 00:01:52     555     11.67     44
> 2010.12.26 00:02:52     566     11.67     44
>
> etc.
>
> Thanks a lot!
>
>
--
Sarah Goslee