A read.table mystery (data for Filemaker Mac)
On 12/10/2007, Emmanuel Charpentier <charpent at bacbuc.dyndns.org> wrote:
Mark Wardle a ?crit :
1. Which version of Filemaker? NB: Framemaker is a different program (desktop publishing), so do be a little precise!
Dunno. The file is named "export.fm7" ; one might be tempted to infer Filemaker 7.
Probably: Filemaker 7 or later, as newer versions share the same file format.
"Framemaker" is a typo....
2. If it is an ancient version, then I suggest exporting a block of columns at a time, and then using merge() in R to join it all back up
Not an option : I do not make the export myself, and I do not have Filemaker on any machine I can lay my hands on...
So you can't ask the person doing the export to do this? I have to say I have no problem exporting data from Filemaker 7 and above - with no size limitations. Mind you, you may not believe me, but one very good way of doing export is to export as HTML, and then import into Excel.
3. I store all my clinical data in Filemaker 8.5 on the Mac. It is great. There have been no significant data export or import issues.
Except for date formats (DD/MM/YYYY in lieu of YYYY-MM-DD), numeric values (comma as decimal mark) and character set (something looking like Latin-1 in lieu of utf8). <Sigh ...>
Weird. My numeric values aren't exported like that! I can get dates converted easily?
One problem (with this version - may be fixed in 9.0) is that Filemaker ODBC drivers are pretty dreadful and so I do not use ODBC to access the data held in a Filemaker database. However, Filemaker's client ODBC access works fine, and, in conjunction with some commercial ODBC drivers for PostgreSQL, export my data into postgresql, and then from there import data into R. It is fast and works very well, albeit in a rather convoluted fashion!
That would be a (good !) option if both the "data producer" and me had access to a common database server. It turns out not to be the case (alas...). As a general comment, I fpound the combination of a DBMS (Postgres in my case), an ODBC-able front end (OOo base, MS-Access, Filemaker : p?ck ypouir poison...) and R a very good working setup. I use it every time I can. However, in this case, that's pipedream...
If you wish, I would be happy to look at your FP7 file and see what the problem is. Best wishes, Mark
Dr. Mark Wardle Specialist registrar, Neurology Cardiff, UK