Summary: [R] How to represent pure linefeeds chr(10) under R for Windows

[Gabor Grothendieck]

While I don't disagree with what you say, the purpose of this 
is to interface to Excel which is even less free (you
have to pay for Excel but not for dataload) so 
perhaps the status of the glue used between R and Excel 
is not as important.  

>From an expediency viewpoint, I found that dataload solves
a wide variety of interfacing problems easily, typically 
in a single line of code, using a single tool and consistent 
syntax.  I can translate easily among .rda, .xls, .csv, .txt 
and numerous other formats.  

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Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2003 10:32:44 +0100 
From: Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>
To: <ggrothendieck at myway.com> 
Cc: <joehl at gmx.de>, <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch> 
Subject: Re: Summary: [R] How to represent pure linefeeds chr(10) under R for Windows 

 
 
>>>>> "Gabor" == Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at myway.com>
>>>>> on Thu, 6 Nov 2003 15:33:04 -0500 (EST) writes:

Gabor> Its also possible to avoid these intricacies by not
Gabor> using an intermediate text representation, i.e. csv,
Gabor> in the first place.

Gabor> The following R code uses the free dataload utility
Gabor> (Google search for Baird dataload utility) to create
Gabor> an .xls file from data frame, x:

Gabor> save(x,file="x.rda") 
Gabor> system("dataload x.rda x.xls/u")

Gabor> At this point you can read x.xls into Excel.

Note that this has two "problems" IMO, which Jens' R-only
solution does not have:

1) dataload is *not* free software in the sense of the 
Free Software Foundation (which has existed for a much
longer time than MS windows!):
It's only "free" as in "free beer", not "free" as in "free speech" .
For more, read the "Free as in Freedom" main link on http://www.fsf.org/

2) dataload is only available as *binary* on *some* platforms,
as opposed to R which is available to everyone working with
it :-)

Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>     http://stat.ethz.ch/~maechler/
Seminar fuer Statistik, ETH-Zentrum LEO C16     Leonhardstr. 27
ETH (Federal Inst. Technology)     8092 Zurich     SWITZERLAND
phone: x-41-1-632-3408          fax: ...-1228               <><