This also seems to work:> strsplit(paste(x,collapse="\n"),"\n")[[1]][1] "abc" "def" "" "ghi"> On 5 Feb 2025, at 14:44 , Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote: > > If I have this object: > > x <- c("abc\ndef", "", "ghi") > > and I write it to a file using `writeLines(x, "test.txt")`, my text editor sees a 5 line file: > > 1: abc > 2: def > 3: > 4: ghi > 5: > > which is what I'd expect: the last line in the editor is empty. If I use `readLines("test.txt")` on that file, I get the vector > > c("abc", "def", "", "ghi") > > and all of that is fine. > > What I'm looking for is simple code that modifies x to the `readLines()` output, without actually writing and reading it. > > My first attempt doesn't work: > > unlist(strsplit(x, "\n")) > > because it leaves out the blank line 3. I can fix that with this ugly code: > > lines <- strsplit(x, "\n") > lines[sapply(lines, length) == 0] <- list("") > lines <- unlist(lines) > > Surely there's a simpler way to do this? I'd like to use just base functions, no other packages. > > Duncan Murdoch > > ______________________________________________ > 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 https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.-- Peter Dalgaard, Professor, Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark Phone: (+45)38153501 Office: A 4.23 Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com
Thanks to Rui, Peter and Tanvir! Peter's seems to be the fastest of the 3 suggestions so far on the little test case, but on the real data (where x contains several thousand lines), Rui's seems best. Duncan On 2025-02-05 9:13 a.m., peter dalgaard wrote:> This also seems to work: > >> strsplit(paste(x,collapse="\n"),"\n")[[1]] > [1] "abc" "def" "" "ghi" > > >> On 5 Feb 2025, at 14:44 , Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote: >> >> If I have this object: >> >> x <- c("abc\ndef", "", "ghi") >> >> and I write it to a file using `writeLines(x, "test.txt")`, my text editor sees a 5 line file: >> >> 1: abc >> 2: def >> 3: >> 4: ghi >> 5: >> >> which is what I'd expect: the last line in the editor is empty. If I use `readLines("test.txt")` on that file, I get the vector >> >> c("abc", "def", "", "ghi") >> >> and all of that is fine. >> >> What I'm looking for is simple code that modifies x to the `readLines()` output, without actually writing and reading it. >> >> My first attempt doesn't work: >> >> unlist(strsplit(x, "\n")) >> >> because it leaves out the blank line 3. I can fix that with this ugly code: >> >> lines <- strsplit(x, "\n") >> lines[sapply(lines, length) == 0] <- list("") >> lines <- unlist(lines) >> >> Surely there's a simpler way to do this? I'd like to use just base functions, no other packages. >> >> Duncan Murdoch >> >> ______________________________________________ >> 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 https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html >> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. >