[R] converting an ASCII file to a matrix

[Uwe Ligges]

Uwe Ligges wrote:

> Michael Graber wrote:
> 
>> Dear R-WinEdit users,
> 
> 
> a) What is an R-WinEdit user?
> 
> b) I guess you mean R-WinEdt (without an i) implying the plug-in for the 
> WinEdt editor? WinEdit is another editor that does not support R very 
> closely, AFAIK.
> 
> c) The following questions are completely unrelated to any editor, so 
> why do you ask only a very small (empty?) subset of the R community?
> 
> 
>> I have a simple question, but somehow I cannot find the answer even
>> though I tried a lot!
>>
>> I have an unstructured ASCII-file and I want to import it into a matrix
>> m in R, so that every character is defined by m[i;j]. The rows are not
> 
> 
> d) What does m[i;j] mean? If we are speaking R, I guess you mean m[i,j]?
> 
> 
>> of the same length.
>>
>> The file looks like the following shortened abstract example:
>>
>> name: xxxxx xxxx
>> age: 9.9.99
>> record number: 999
>> title: xxxxx xxxx xxx
>> keywords: xxx xx
>>
>> "white space"
>>
>> name: yyyy yyyyyyyyyyyy
>> age: 8.8.88
>> record number: 8
>> title: yyyy yy yyyy
>> keywords: yyyyyyyyyyy yyyyyyyy yyy
>>
>> "white space"
>>
>> The result should be for example: m[1;1]=n
> 
> 
> So what aboutreading all lines, and storing separate characters as 
> vectors in a list using strsplit().
>   L <- strsplit(readLines(filename), "")
>   L[[i]][j]
> 
> A matrix seems to be the wrong way with unequal line lengths.


Let me add, what about reading it in using read.dcf(), a function that 
is designed for the data specified above!
And much more appropriate than looking at single characters, I think.

Uwe Ligges



> Uwe Ligges
> 
> 
>> I would be very grateful for your help!
>>
>> Michael Graber
>> michael.graber at mail.uni-wuerzburg.de
>>
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> 
> 
>