[R] comments in scan

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11/27/2006 9:23 PM, Jarrett Byrnes wrote:
> Right, but what if it is not the first line?  

If it's not the first line, then you should follow the instructions that 
start on the 4th line of my reply.

Duncan Murdoch


For example
> 
> #data block 1
> 34,54,23
> 23,53,12
> 35,23,23
> #data block 2
> 64,24,13
> 354,24,12
> 324,13,3
> 
> On Nov 27, 2006, at 4:39 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> 
>> On 11/27/2006 7:25 PM, Jarrett Byrnes wrote:
>>> I had a question about scan in R.  For better code readability, I   
>>> would like to have lines in the block of data to be scanned that  
>>> are  commented - not just lines that have a comment at the end.   
>>> For example
>>> #age, weight, height
>>> 33,128,65
>>> 34,56,155
>>> instead of having to do something like
>>> 33,128,65 #age, weight, height
>>> 34,56,155
>>> Is this at all possible?
>> If it's on the first line, it's easy:  just use skip=1 to skip the  
>> first line.
>>
>> The general case
>>
>> #age, weight, height
>> 33,128,65
>> # and now for something completely different
>> 34,56,155
>>
>> probably needs something like this:
>>
>>  scan("foo", what=list(0,0,0), comment.char="#", sep=",",  
>> multi.line=T)
>>
>> i.e. you need to tell it how many objects are in a record, and  
>> allow records to span multiple lines.  Watch out for typos in the  
>> file that put different numbers of entries on each line, because  
>> scan() won't complain about it.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch