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write.table vs. read.table and the argument "fill"

4 messages · Joshua Wiley, David Winsemius, Carl Witthoft

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Just wondering how come read.table lets you specify fill=TRUE for ragged 
arrays, but so far as I can tell, no equivalent for write.table?

Not a big deal, since I'm perfectly comfortable w/ write and scan and 
the other file I/O goodies.  "A foolish inconsistency..."  and all that.


Carl
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Hi Carl,

What would the "equivalent" argument for write.table do?  Or perhaps
to rephrase my question what type of R object do you have in mind to
write that is a "ragged array"?

Josh
On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 7:38 AM, Carl Witthoft <carl at witthoft.com> wrote:

  
    
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On May 7, 2011, at 10:38 AM, Carl Witthoft wrote:

            
I imagine the answer is something along the lines of ....read.table  
creates a rectangular structure and write.table outputs a rectangular  
structure, so they are congruent. If I wanted to accomplish writing a  
ragged list I would consider using lapply , paste,  and writeLines.

  
    
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Well, it could be a list variable.
foo<- 1:7
bar<-1:9
rab<-list(foo,bar)

I suppose I could do something like

oof<-rbind(foo,bar)
write.table(oof)  #ignore the warnings

and then ignore or delete the redundant items in the output file.
On 5/8/11 1:51 AM, Joshua Wiley wrote: