Carol,
while sep="" is the default, it really means 'whitespace', see the
documentation of 'sep'.
Göran Broström
On 2014-06-26 11:21, carol white wrote:
Hi,
with read.fwf, it works.
But I still don't understand why it doesn't work with read.table
since the sep by default is "", which is the case and in one trial, I
used read.table("myfile",colClasses = "character",
stringsAsFactors=FALSE, and stil didn't work but it should have.
Regards,
On Thursday, June 26, 2014 9:59 AM, Ron Crump
<r.e.cr...@warwick.ac.uk> wrote:
Hi Carol,
It might be a primitive question but I have a file of text and
there is no separator between character on each line and the
strings on each line have the same length. The format is like the
following
absfjdslf jfdldskjff jfsldfjslk
When I read the file with read.table("myfile",colClasses =
"character"), instead of putting the strings in a table of number
of rows x length of string, read.table saves the file in a table of
number of rows x 1 and each element seems to be a factor. Why does
read.table not account for colClasses = "character"?
read.table relies on a separator to differentiate between columns, so
it is not appropriate for your file, read.fwf would do the job.
Setting colClasses (in my understanding) tells read.table how to
treat input as it comes in - so it disables some testing of data
types and makes reading quicker, it does not disable the setting of
character data to be factors, which is the default. You need to use
the stringsAsFactors=FALSE option for that.
So, for your example (and I have added a letter to the first row to
make it the same length as the others):
cf <- "absfjdslfx
jfdldskjff jfsldfjslk"
cdf <-
read.fwf(textConnection(cf),widths=rep(1,10),colClasses="character",stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
See ?read.fwf for more information. A width is required for each
column (in this case 1 repeated 10 times).
Hope this helps.
Ron. [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
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.
