[R] reading and analyzing a text file

[Prof Brian Ripley]

1) read.table has a 'skip' argument which may suffice.

2) R has the concept of 'connections' to read sequentially through a file. 
See the 'R Data Import/Export' manual.

If that is not enough hints, showing us an example usually intrigues 
people enough to offer working code.

On Fri, 16 May 2008, DAVID ARTETA GARCIA wrote:

> Dear list,
>
> I have a text file from a scanner that includes 20 lines of text (scanner 
> settings) before it actually starts showing the readings in a tabular format 
> (headings are ID, intensity, background and few others).
>
> I am a biologist with some experience using R and my question is if it is 
> possible to read this file into an R workspace and store the actual readings 
> in a dataframe, avoiding the text at the begining. It seems to me that this 
> is not the actual purpose of R, but maybe someone can point me to a method 
> for doing this. Do I need to parse the file with some other programming 
> language? is it possible to link, say, Perl or C++ with R to automate the 
> reading and the analysis of such files? The aim is to be able to automate 
> this analysis since these files are our routine experimental output.
>
> Thanks for your help,
>
> D.
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595