Reading fixed column format
Jason Barnhart <jasoncbarnhart <at> msn.com> writes:
These posts may be helpful. http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/05/06/5776.html https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2002-May/021145.html Using scan directly may also work for you rather than read.fwf. Also, there are posts regarding using other tools such a 'perl' or 'cut' to prepocess the data before reading with R. Searching the archives with those keywords should help.
I new user should not have to learn "perl","cut", "awk", etc simply to be able to use R. Does not make sense to me.