[R] how to read this kind of csv in R？

[Rui Barradas]

Hello,

It is not clear if all files have

* a first block with just one data line
* all other blocks with as many rows as the numbers in that first data line.

If yes, maybe something like this?

lns <- readLines("strange.csv")
lns <- lns[sapply(lns, nchar) > 0]
lns <- sub(",$", "", lns)
i_title <- grep("[[:alpha:]]", lns)

tmp <- lapply(seq_along(i_title), function(i){
   tmp <- if(i < length(i_title)){
     lns[(i_title[i] + 1):(i_title[i + 1] - 1)]
   }else{
     lns[(i_title[i] + 1):length(lns)]
   }
   list(n = length(tmp), text = unlist(strsplit(tmp, ",")))
})

n <- max(sapply(tmp, '[[', 'n'))
tmp <- lapply(tmp, function(x) as.numeric(x$text))
tmp[[1]] <- rep(tmp[[1]], each = n)
res <- do.call(cbind.data.frame, tmp)
names(res) <- lns[i_title]
res


If you have hundreds of files, you should make a function out of the 
code above.

Hope this helps,

Rui Barradas

Às 12:29 de 06/10/19, vod vos via R-help escreveu:
> I got hundreds of csv files. The real formats in each csv file are as follows:
> 
> aa(cm)
> 1, 2 , 3,
> 
> bb(mm)
> 1, 2, 3,
> 4, 5, 6,
> 7, 8, 9,
> 
> cc(mm)
> 3, 4, 5,
> 7, 5, 9,
> 6, 5, 8,
> 
> How can I use read.table or read.csv to convert the csv files
> to a tidy data frame format as follow:
> 
> aa, bb, cc
> 1, 1, 3
> 1, 2, 4
> 1, 3, 5
> 2, 4, 7
> 2, 5, 5
> 2, 6, 9
> 3, 7, 6
> 3, 8, 5
> 3, 9, 8
> 
> many thanks.
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help using r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>