Thank you, Gabor. This has seemingly resolved the issue. Perhaps a quick follow up. Suppose I know that the 1st variable I am reading in is to be numeric and the second is character. Can that be specified in the substr() argument?
sqldf("select substr(V1, 1, 1) f1, substr(V1, 2, 4) f2 from fixed") -----Original Message----- From: Gabor Grothendieck [mailto:ggrothendi...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, September 15, 2014 12:42 PM To: Doran, Harold Cc: r-help@r-project.org Subject: Re: [R] Using sqldf() to read in .fwf files On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 12:09 PM, Doran, Harold <hdo...@air.org> wrote: > I am learning to use sqldf() to read in very large fixed width files > that otherwise do not work efficiently with read.fwf. I found the > following example online and have worked with this in various ways to > read in the data > > cat("1 8.3 > 210.3 > 319.0 > 416.0 > 515.6 > 719.8 > ", file = "fixed") > > fixed <- file("fixed") > sqldf("select substr(V1, 1, 1) f1, substr(V1, 2, 4) f2 from fixed") > > I then applied this to my real world data problem though it yields the > following error message and I am not sure how to interpret this. > > dor <- file("dor") >> sqldf("select substr(V1, 1, 1) f1, substr(V1, 2, 4) f2 from dor") > Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings, : > line 1 did not have 6 elements > > Looking at my .fwf. data in a text editor shows the data are structured as I > would expect. In fact, I can read in the first few lines of the file using > read.fwf and the data are as I would expect after being read into R. > We want it to regard the entire line as one field so specify sep= as some character not in the file. attr(fixed, "file.format") <- list(sep = ";") -- Statistics & Software Consulting GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc. tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com ______________________________________________ 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.