[R] need help using read.fortran

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 06/03/2013 12:57 PM, jsdroyster wrote:
> Hello kind and R-knowledgeable souls!
>
> I am trying to use read.fortran to read in old datasets in 80-column-card format
> with no separators between variables (just 80 columns of solid digits).
> I comprehend the instructions for specifying the columns for each variable, but
> I can't understand how to assign the variable names after reading the help pages
> for read.fortran, read.fwf and read.table.
>
> I tried putting a col.names section in the read.fortran statement:
>
> AN35 <-data.frame(read.fortran(filename,c("I9","4I2","2I1","3I2","I1","16I2",
> "I1","I5","I1","I3","I2",  "A4","3A1","A2","A1"),
>    header = FALSE,skip=0,sep="@",
>    col.names =
> paste(idno,empmo,empyr,birthmo,birthyr,sex,race,teno,testmo,testyr,
>       testtyp,L500,L1k,L2k,L3k,L4k,L6k,L8k,RT1k,R500,R1k,R2k,R3k,R4k,R6k,R8k,
>       HPD,dept,shift,TWA,envclas,jobcode,hobby.med.STS,audclas,disp),

The paste() call will try to find variables with those names, and 
concatenate their contents.  That's not what you want.  You want 
something like

col.names = c("idno", "empmo", ....)


>    row.names = (idno) ))
>
>
> I also tried a separate dimnames statement like so:
>
> dimnames(AN35)[[2]] <-
> c("idno","empmo","empyr","birthmo","birthyr","sex","race",
>      
> "teno","testmo","testyr","testtyp","L500","L1k","L2k","L3k","L4k","L6k","L8k","RT1k",
>
>      "R500","R1k","R2k","R3k","R4k","R6k","R8k","HPD","dept","shift","TWA",
>      "envclas","jobcode","hobby","med","STS","audclas","disp")
>
>
> I copied this from some documentation but I have no clue what the [[2]]  means.

dimnames() is a function that returns a list of row names and column 
names.  The column names are the second component, so

dimnames(AN35)[[2]] <- something

changes the column names.

Duncan Murdoch
>
> If anyone has one good example that would help me a lot!
> Thanks in advance!
> Julie
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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