[R] skipping columns with read.fwf?

[Pierre Kleiber]

If you are in a Unix-like environment, you can use awk to preselect
the columns you want as follows:

read.table(pipe("awk '{print $1,$3,$4,$5,$6,$7,$8,$25,$26,$27,$40}' fwf"))

  Cheers, Pierre


Brett A Magill wrote:
> I have a file in fwf.  It is rather large, about 40,000 rows and 40 variables (columns).  I only need about 10 variables form the data set for the analysis at hand.  Unfortunately, these 10 variables are not contiguous in the file, for example, the first is position 1-8, the next position 25-27, then 40.
> 
> Is there a way to read the selected varaibles that I need without reading in the entire data set?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Brett    
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