[R] Data separated by spaces, getting data into R using field lengths

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 9/8/2009 8:21 AM, Lauri Nikkinen wrote:
> This data is from database and the maximum length of a field is
> defined. I mean that every column has a maximum length and I want to
> use this maximum length as a separator. So if one "cell" in that
> column is shorter than the maximum, "cell" should be padded with white
> spaces or something like that. This seems to be hard to explain.

Your problem is the intermediate file.  Why not get R to read directly 
from the database, using RODBC?

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> Regards,
> L
> 
> 2009/9/8 Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca>:
>> On 9/8/2009 8:07 AM, Lauri Nikkinen wrote:
>>>
>>> Thanks, I tried it but I got
>>>
>>>> varlength <- c(2, 2, 18, 5, 18)
>>>> read.fwf("c:temppi.txt", widths=varlength)
>>>
>>>  V1 V2                 V3    V4   V5
>>> 1 DF 12  This is an exampl e 1 T  his
>>> 2 DF 12  This is an 1232 T his i    s
>>> 3 DF 14  This is 12334 Thi s is   an
>>> 4 DF 15  This 23 This is a n exa mple
>>>
>>> Which is not the way I want it.
>>
>> It looks as though that's because you don't have fixed width data.  " This
>> is an example" is 19 chars, including the leading space.  You told R it was
>> 18.  " This is an " is only 12 characters.
>>
>> I would say you have two fixed width fields, and three varying fields, with
>> no delimiters.  If the middle one of the three always contains digits and
>> the others don't, you can probably extract them using sub(), but you can't
>> use any of the read.* functions to do this:  your format is too strange.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>
>>>
>>> structure(list(V1 = structure(c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L), .Label = "DF", class
>>> = "factor"),
>>>    V2 = c(12L, 12L, 14L, 15L), V3 = structure(c(4L, 3L, 2L,
>>>    1L), .Label = c(" This 23 This is a", " This is 12334 Thi",
>>>    " This is an 1232 T", " This is an exampl"), class = "factor"),
>>>    V4 = structure(c(1L, 2L, 4L, 3L), .Label = c("e 1 T", "his i",
>>>    "n exa", "s is "), class = "factor"), V5 = structure(c(2L,
>>>    4L, 1L, 3L), .Label = c("an ", "his", "mple", "s"), class =
>>> "factor")), .Names = c("V1",
>>> "V2", "V3", "V4", "V5"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA,
>>> -4L))
>>>
>>> Any ideas?
>>> -L
>>>
>>> 2009/9/8 Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca>:
>>>>
>>>> On 9/8/2009 7:53 AM, Lauri Nikkinen wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I have a text file similar to this (separated by spaces):
>>>>>
>>>>> x <- "DF12 This is an example 1 This
>>>>> DF12 This is an 1232 This is
>>>>> DF14 This is 12334 This is an
>>>>> DF15 This 23 This is an example
>>>>> "
>>>>>
>>>>> and I know the field lengths of each variable (there is 5 variables in
>>>>> this data set), which are:
>>>>>
>>>>> varlength <- c(2, 2, 18, 5, 18)
>>>>>
>>>>> How can I import this kind of data into R, using the varlength
>>>>> variable as an field separator indicator?
>>>>
>>>> See ?read.fwf.
>>>>
>>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>>
>>
>>
> 
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