Reading a file w/ two delimiters

On Nov 18, 2011, at 9:13 AM, Langston, Jim wrote:

Thanks Paul,

That's the path I was marching down, I was hoping for something
a little cleaner, I do the same with Perl or Java.

tesfil <- "aa|bb|cc\tdd|ee|ff\t"

read.table(textConnection(gsub("\\\t", "\n", scan(

? ? ? ? ? ? ? textConnection(tesfil), # substitute your file here
? ? ? ? ? ? ? what="character")) ), sep="|")
Read 2 items
?V1 V2 V3
1 aa bb cc
2 dd ee ff

Jim

On 11/18/11 8:35 AM, "Paul Hiemstra" <paul.hiemstra at knmi.nl> wrote:

Hi Jim,

You can read the text file using readLines. This puts each line in the
file into an element of a list. Then you can go through the lines
manually (e.g. using grep, sub, strsplit) and create your data.frame.

cheers,
Paul

On 11/18/2011 12:37 PM, Langston, Jim wrote:

Hi all,

I've been scratching and poking, but basically, the file I need to read
has
two delimiters that I need to contend with. The first is that the file
contains
tabs (\t) , instead of newlines (\n), and the second is that the fields
have
| for the seperators. I can easily do a read if I first convert the \t
to
\n
and then use read.table to get the file read with the | separator. But,
what I would really like to do, is do this all within R. I have a lot of
files
to read and do analysis on.

I can read the data into a table using the \t has delimiter, but can't
figure
out how to take that table data and use the | for separation, I've look
at
string splits, etc. but haven't figured out how to split the whole
table.

Any thoughts ? hints ?

Thanks,

Jim


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