[R] Binary Value into Text

Jeff Newmiller
Tue, 14 Jun 2016 04:05:26 -0000

Please post in plain text format. Only you have the power to format your
email the way we will see it... using the default HTML format only leads
to odd wraparounds and weird characters that you don't know about when you
send but we have to wade through when we recieve it.

"Character" data is rather more complex now than it used to be in days
of
yore... what with Unicode UTF16 and UTF-8 and so on. You are getting into
deep water trying to mix binary and text data. (I know enough to know I am
no expert in this topic.) I highly recommend reading the article by Paul
Murrell on reading binary data [1], but even that is unlikely to answer
all the headaches you are diving into and it will probably stop being "on
topic" for this list pretty quickly.

One key point is that you should read "raw" data, not
"character" data
when getting data out of files, even if they are opened in "binary
mode".

[1] Viewing binary files with the hexview package. R News, 7(1):2--8,
April 2007.

On Mon, 13 Jun 2016, Fahman Khan via R-help wrote:

> I have written a following piece of code.?
>> binaryFile <- file("sampleBinary.dat",
'rb')>readBin(binaryFile, character(), endian="little")
>
> I'm getting a warning message that says?
>
> Warning message:?In readBin(binaryFile, chracter(),
endian="little") : incomplete string at end of file has been discarded
>
> I did research on this topic but was still unable to solve.
>
> My file contains the following binary values:?01101000 01100101 01101100
01101100 01101111 00001010 which is hello in text. I just want to convert this
into text.?
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff Newmiller                        The     .....       .....  Go Live...
DCN:<jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us>        Basics: ##.#.       ##.#.  Live
Go...
                                       Live:   OO#.. Dead: OO#..  Playing
Research Engineer (Solar/Batteries            O.O#.       #.O#.  with
/Software/Embedded Controllers)               .OO#.       .OO#.  rocks...1k
---------------------------------------------------------------------------