[R] Reading hierarchical data

I would like to read the following hierarchical data set. There is a family record followed by one or more personal records. If col. 7 is 1 it is a family record. If it is 2 it is a personal record. The family record is formatted as follows: col. 1-5 family id col. 71 col. 9

Re: [R] Reading hierarchical data

Will this do it for you: input - readLines(textConnection(06470 1 1 + 1 232 0 + 2 230 1 + 07470 1 0 + 1 240 1 + 08470 1 0 + 1 227 0 + 09470 1 0 + 1 213 1 + 2 222 0 + 3 224 1 + 10470 1 1 + 1 220 0 + 2 211 1 + 11470 1 0 + 1 217 0 + 2 210 1 + 3 226

Re: [R] Reading hierarchical data

Try this. It uses input defined in Jim's post and defines the rectype of each row (1 or 2). It then reads the rectype 1 records into DF1 using read.fwf and the rectype 2 records into DF2 also using read.fwf. ix is defined to have one component per personal record giving the row number in DF1 of

Re: [R] Reading hierarchical data

Here is a further simplification. We use the colClasses= argument with NULL for the columns we do not want so we do not have to later remove those columns. # record type (1 or 2) rectype - substr(input, 7, 7) # read in record type 1 input1 - input[rectype == 1] DF1 -