[R] Programcode and data in the same textfile

[Barry Rowlingson]

>       file = tmpfile, sep="\n")
>   close(tmpfile)
>   read.table(tmpfilename, header = TRUE)
> 

  Eurgh! Does R clean up tempfiles by itself?

  Here's my idea. Just stick all the values in a vector, using 
free-formatting to make it look nice, then reform it into a data frame:

indata <- function(x){

   data <- c(

             "Sex", "Id",  "Age",
             "Male",   1,   13.2,
             "Female", 2,    8.1,
             "Male",   3,    6.3,
             "Male",   2,   12.2,

             )

   ncol <- 3
   nrow <- length(data)/ncol

   heads <- data[1:ncol];data <- data[-(1:ncol)]
   asDF <- data.frame(matrix(data,ncol=ncol,byrow=T))

   asDF[,2] <- as.numeric(asDF[,2])
   asDF[,3] <- as.numeric(asDF[,3])
   names(asDF) <- heads
   asDF
}



   Note that 'data' will be all character if there's any characters in 
it, so you need to tweak the types with as.numeric or as.factor if thats 
what you need. You could probably test if a column was all valid numbers 
and automatically make it numeric, but then we're going a long way to 
duplicating a lot of the code in read.table, which does something like 
this (it uses 'scan()' to read from a file and then reforms it all into 
a data frame).

All values must be comma separated and character values must be quoted.

Baz