[R] reading in data contingent upon a character at col 1

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Patrick E. McKnight wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I have a text file that is output from a statistics package that I would like
> to read into R.  Since I have several hundred of these output files I would
> prefer not to edit them manually.  The problem is that it has a ";" (without
> the quotes) as the first character for some lines - lines that I do not
> necessarily want to read in.  Use of tr, sed, awk or any other unix command
> line utilities would not be suitable for this application.
>
> A sample of the file looks like this:
>
> ; Title of the run
> ; some other information
> ; subject var1 var2 var3 var4
>    000001   23   34   12   23
> ;  000002   00   00   00   00
>    000003   15   18   30   29
> ;  000004   00   00   00   00
>    000005   00   12   34   56
>
> Essentially the commented out lines with the ";" characters were not
> estimated in the analysis so I do not want them to be read into the data
> frame.  Is there a way to skip the line if it contains a ";" in column 1?  If
> so, how might I accomplish this feat?  Thanks in advance for your help.

We've anticipated your request!  Take a look at ?read.table in R-devel.
That has a `comment.char' argument.  Just one warning: by default R-devel
saves in a different format from 1.3.1, so if you want to transfer a
workspace back, check the options on save.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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