[R] MS Excel Data

[apjaworski at mmm.com]

Here is a very crude function I use quite often.  It tries to recognize
whether you have headers or not by checking the very first character.  If
it is numeric, it assumes that there are no headers. The suppressWarnings
gets rid of a warning one gets when trying to coerce a character to
numeric.   The main advantage of the function is that you do not have to
type too much :-)

clip <- function(){
    if(is.na(suppressWarnings(as.numeric(scan("clipboard", what="",
nmax=1)))))
       read.delim("clipboard")
    else
       read.delim("clipboard", header=FALSE)

Cheers,

Andy

__________________________________
Andy Jaworski
518-1-01
Process Laboratory
3M Corporate Research Laboratory
-----
E-mail: apjaworski at mmm.com
Tel:  (651) 733-6092
Fax:  (651) 736-3122


                                                                           
             Bert Gunter                                                   
             <gunter.berton at ge                                             
             ne.com>                                                    To 
             Sent by:                  "'Gabor Grothendieck'"              
             r-help-bounces at r-         <ggrothendieck at gmail.com>           
             project.org                                                cc 
                                       r-help at r-project.org                
                                                                   Subject 
             11/29/2007 06:39          Re: [R] MS Excel Data               
             PM                                                            
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           




Better yet! Thanks Gabor.

-- Bert

-----Original Message-----
From: Gabor Grothendieck [mailto:ggrothendieck at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2007 12:10 PM
To: Bert Gunter
Cc: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] MS Excel Data

On Nov 29, 2007 3:01 PM, Bert Gunter <gunter.berton at gene.com> wrote:
> This has been discussed on this list many times before. Google on "Import
> Excel R". Note also that there are potential problems (loss of digits)
due
> to Excel "idiosyncracies" depending on what you do.
> http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/spreadsheet_addiction.html
provides
> some details.
>
> Finally, I have found that for rectangular data sets with no missing
fields
> in Excel (tables), cutting and read.tabling **the data only ** is a
> simple(but probably not without risk) way to do it:
>
> (after cutting the data only in Excel to the clipboard) in R:
>
> newdat <- read.table("clipboard", head=FALSE, row.names=NULL)
>
> The columns can then be named via names(newdat) <- ...
>
> I omit column headers because in most of the Excel data I get the column
> names have spaces and other non-alphanumeric characters which R cannot
> easily digest. One could separately scan() just the vector of column
headers
> and use regular expressions to extract the names. But for small tables, I
> find it easier just to create the names manually.

You can include headers with spaces in the copy with:

    DF <- read.delim("clipboard")

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