Read every second line from ASCII file
Dear all, I just realized that I forgotten to write some kind of final email for this thread and to thank you for your help. It seems that the recommeneded procedure in such circumstances has three steps: 1) readLines() 2) select the desired lines 3) strsplit() Thanks Ferdinand, Jim, and Paul! Roland
Roland Rau wrote:
Dear all,
I have an ASCII file where records are separated by a blank. I would
like to read those data; however, only the data in rows 1, 3, 5, 7, ...
are important; the other lines (2,4,6,8,....) contain no useful
information for me.
So far I used awk/gawk to do it:
gawk '{if ((FNR % 2) != 0) {print $0}}' infile.txt > outfile.txt
What is the recommended way to accomplish this in R?
Simply reading the whole file, and deleting all the even-numbered lines
is not straightforward since these lines have different length (whereas
lines 1,3,5,7,... have the same length).
I 'RSiteSearched' for "read every second line from a file" but this
search did not yield the desired result.
Also trying out the arguments nrows and skip from read.table() did not
help.
Maybe someone knows an easy way to do it from within R? -- of course not
using system("gawk ....") :-)
If not, it does not matter too much since I get the job done easily with
awk.
Thanks,
Roland