[R] column-binary data

[David Barron]

Thanks for the replies.  That's not quite what I meant.  These data are multipunched to allow more than one variable to be coded in the same column.  For example, the first 7 columns of the first card of the data I'm trying to read contain the following:

Column   Rows      Description
-------------------------------
1-5                Serial number
6                  Card number
7         Y,X      Sex of respondent
7         0-3      Marital status
7         4-9      Occupational status

I happen to know that the actual punches for the first respondent are 00001,1,Y,1,4.

When I use
> ip <- readBin(ff,what="raw",n=14,signed=FALSE) 
I get
> 08 00 08 00 08 00 08 00 04 00 04 00 24 20
for these seven columns.

When I use raw2bin from package caTools I get:
> binip <- raw2bin(ip,"integer",size=2)
>   8    8    8    8    4    4 8228

Now I can see that the relationship between binary numbers and punches is this:
                             
binary      punch                  binary         punch
------------------                 ------------------------
1            3                     256            9
2            2                     512            8
4            1                     1024           7
8            0                     2048           6
16           X                     4096           5
32           Y                     8192           4
64                                 16384
128                                32768 

I can also see that the binary value for column 7 (8228) is equal to the sum of the values for each of the three punches in that column (Y=32 + 1=4 + 4=8192), but what I don't get is how I can get R to work out the punches either from the raw values or from the binary values.  If anyone can suggest anything I would be very, very grateful!

David

-----Original Message-----
From:	Ted Harding [mailto:Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk]
Sent:	Fri 9/16/2005 14:31
To:	E-Mail
Cc:	David Barron
Subject:	Re: [R] column-binary data
On 16-Sep-05 jim holtman wrote:
> Each card column had 12 rows, so as binary it comes in as 12 bits. The 
> question is does this come as a 16 bit integer, or a string of 12 bits
> that I have to extract from. Either case is not that difficult to do.

Indeed ... as an example of how one could proceed, I "deconstruct"
my example below (see at end).

> On 9/16/05, Ted Harding <Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk> wrote: 
>> 
>> On 16-Sep-05 David Barron wrote:
>> > I have a number of datasets that are multipunch column-binary
>> > format.
>> > Does anyone have any advice on how to read this into R? Thanks.
>> >
>> > David
>> 
>> Do you mean something like the old
>> 
>> HOLLERITH PUNCHED CARD BINARY FORMAT?
>> 1111111110111111101111011111101111110
>> 0000000001000000010000100000010000001
>> 0000010100110000000010000001100010011
>> 1111001010001010000000001100100101001
>> 0111100100011001100001000100001101011
>> 0100010000001100001010010101001110001
>> 0100101000010101001100001010100101101
>> 
>> (here "1" = hole in card, binary representation of 7-bit ASCII
>> encoding, high-order bit on top).

#First, construct a vector ASCII consiting of the printable
#characters:

ASCII<-c(" ","!","\"","#","$","%","&","'","(",")",
         "*","+",",","-",".","/","0","1","2","3",
         "4","5","6","7","8","9",":",";","<","=",
         ">","?","@","A","B","C","D","E","F","G",
         "H","I","J","K","L","M","N","O","P","Q",
         "R","S","T","U","V","W","X","Y","Z","[",
         "\\","]","^","_","`","a","b","c","d","e",
         "f","g","h","i","j","k","l","m","n","o",
         "p","q","r","s","t","u","v","w","x","y",
         "z","{","|","}","~")


#Next, a vector of powers of 2:

rad<-2^(6:0)


#Read in the data from stdin():

M<-t(matrix(as.integer(unlist((strsplit(scan(stdin(),
     what="character"),split="")))),ncol=7))

#(read 7 lines from stdin by copy&paste:
#1: 1111111110111111101111011111101111110
#2: 0000000001000000010000100000010000001
#3: 0000010100110000000010000001100010011
#4: 1111001010001010000000001100100101001
#5: 0111100100011001100001000100001101011
#6: 0100010000001100001010010101001110001
#7: 0100101000010101001100001010100101101
#8: 
#Read 7 items

#and convert the columns to ASCII codes:

R<-rad%*%M

#and see what you've got:

paste(ASCII[R-31],collapse="")

#[1] "HOLLERITH PUNCHED CARD BINARY FORMAT?"

The above can be adapted to whatever your binary data represent
and to how they are laid out in the input.

Others may find a slicker way of doing this.

The only fly in the above ointment is that I haven't located
in R a character-vector constant which consists of the printable
ASCII characters, or a function to convert numerical ASCII code
to characters, so I made my own.

Best wishes,
Ted.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
Date: 16-Sep-05                                       Time: 22:26:16
------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------