[R] help on readBin in R

Barry Rowlingson
Mon, 17 Apr 2017 10:55:32 -0000

There's very little justification for attaching binary files to a
mailing list these days - share it on Dropbox, or Box, or Hubic, or
whatever MS or Google's cloud storage is, or simply tell us where it
was obtained from originally.

And to the original poster - some more context is very useful - where
did you get it from, what area is it supposed to cover, etc etc.

I hope you don't want to do any serious science with a data file that
you have no provenance for.



On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 4:13 AM, Jeff Newmiller
<jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us> wrote:
> That may or may not work, since text file newlines get altered in them. May
have more luck with a "png" extension?
> --
> Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.
>
> On April 16, 2017 7:33:06 PM PDT, jim holtman <jholtman at gmail.com>
wrote:
>>If the file is not too large, just change the extension to
'.txt' and
>>attach it.  Also include the code that you are using to read it in and
>>a definition of the what the data is; e.g., first two byte are
>>temperature, next four bytes are a station ID, ....
>>
>>Here is an example of reading in a binary file and I know that the
>>'raw' output matches the bytes that are in the file:
>>
>>> infile <- file("test.txt", 'rb')
>>>
>>> input <- readBin(infile, raw(), 100)
>>>
>>> input
>>  [1] 50 4b 03 04 14 00 04 00 08 00 47 95 90 4a 9f 00 7a a0 99 01 00
>>00 7a 08 00 00 13 00 75 00 5b 43 6f
>> [34] 6e 74 65 6e 74 5f 54 79 70 65 73 5d 2e 78 6d 6c 53 44 60 00 a4
>>00 00 00 00 08 00 32 fa a9 3f 63 64
>> [67] 60 69 11 61 60 60 30 00 62 10 f0 01 62 46 56 30 93 55 14 48 55
>>e8 cd 15 fe e5 cf a3 df 6c ab ed 66
>>[100] b1
>>>
>>
>>here is the dump:
>>
>>$ od -a -t x --endian=big test.txt
>>0000000   P   K etx eot dc4 nul eot nul  bs nul   G nak dle   J  us nul
>>               504b0304        14000400        08004795        904a9f00
>>0000020   z  sp  em soh nul nul   z  bs nul nul dc3 nul   u nul   [   C
>>               7aa09901        00007a08        00001300        75005b43
>>0000040   o   n   t   e   n   t   _   T   y   p   e   s   ]   .   x   m
>>               6f6e7465        6e745f54        79706573        5d2e786d
>>
>>Jim Holtman
>>Data Munger Guru
>>
>>What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
>>Tell me what you want to do, not how you want to do it.
>>
>>
>>On Sun, Apr 16, 2017 at 9:21 PM, Jeff Newmiller
>><jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us> wrote:
>>> The mailing list has tight restrictions on attachments, so your
>>attachment was not let through. Read the Posting Guide, and note that
>>sometimes success requires some extended understanding of how your mail
>>software works, and we probably don't know the details either. You
>>might have success changing the file extension or sending a link to the
>>file on a file storage website like Google Drive or Dropbox.
>>> --
>>> Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.
>>>
>>> On April 16, 2017 3:49:07 PM PDT, "M.M saifuddin"
>><mmsaifuddin09 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>I need to view the attached  binary file. but can not read it,
>>instead
>>>>am
>>>>getting very weird( i think garbage) numbers.
>>>>
>>>>The values are Temperature data so it should be somewhat in
between
>>250
>>>>to
>>>>500.
>>>>
>>>>Can any altruist view it and give me the R code to view it.
>>>>
>>>>I am attaching the file. Please help me if you can.
>>>>
>>>>TIA
>>>>______________________________________________
>>>>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.
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> 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.
>
> ______________________________________________
> 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.