The file also has a bunch of email headers stuck in the middle of it:
..... (QUALITY-OF-LIFE SCALE:1-5 4) (ACADEMIC-EMPHASIS HEALTH-SCIENCE) ) ------- ------- >From lebow...@cs.columbia.edu Mon Feb 22 20:53:02 1988 Received: from zodiac by meridian (5.52/4.7) Received: from Jessica.Stanford.EDU by ads.com (5.58/1.9) id AA04539; Mon, 22 Feb 88 20:59:59 PST Received: from Portia.Stanford.EDU by jessica.Stanford.EDU with TCP; Mon, 22 Feb 88 20:58:22 PST Received: from columbia.edu (COLUMBIA.EDU.ARPA) by Portia.STANFORD.EDU (1.2/Ultrix2.0-B) id AA11480; Mon, 22 Feb 88 20:49:53 pst Received: from CS.COLUMBIA.EDU by columbia.edu (5.54/1.14) id AA10186; Mon, 22 Feb 88 23:48:44 EST Message-Id: <8802230448.aa10...@columbia.edu> Date: Fri 22 Jan 88 02:50:00-EST From: The Mailer Daemon <mai...@cs.columbia.edu> To: lebow...@cs.columbia.edu Subject: Message of 18-Jan-88 20:13:54 Resent-Date: Mon 22 Feb 88 23:44:07-EST Resent-From: Michael Lebowitz <lebow...@cs.columbia.edu> Resent-To: soud...@portia.stanford.edu Resent-Message-Id: <12376918538.25.lebow...@cs.columbia.edu> Status: R Message undeliverable and dequeued after 3 days: souders%merid...@ads.arpa: Cannot connect to host ------------ Date: Mon 18 Jan 88 20:13:54-EST From: Michael Lebowitz <lebow...@cs.columbia.edu> Subject: bigger file part 3 To: souders%merid...@ads.arpa In-Reply-To: <8801182147.aa08...@ads.arpa> Message-ID: <12367705229.11.lebow...@cs.columbia.edu> (DEF-INSTANCE GEORGETOWN (STATE MARYLAND) (LOCATION URBAN) (CONTROL PRIVATE) (NO-OF-STUDENTS THOUS:10-15) (MALE:FEMALE RATIO:45:55) .... Which dates it to 1988. Nice. Barry On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 9:20 AM, Peter Crowther <peter.crowt...@melandra.com > wrote: > That's a nice example of why Lisp is both powerful and terrifying - you're > looking at a Lisp *program*, not just Lisp *data*, as Lisp makes no > distinction between the two. You just read 'em in. > > The two definitions at the bottom are function definitions. The top one > defines the def-instance function. Reading that indicates that it accepts > an atom as a name and a list of key-value or key-range-value lists as > properties, where they keys may be repeated to give you multi-valued > attributes in your result. The bottom one defines a function for removing > duplicate entries of the same location. > > The rest of the file (apart from the included email headers) is a whole > load of calls to the def-instance function. In Lisp, you'd define the > functions, then just run the rest of the file. > > To my knowledge, there is no generic way to read Lisp "data" into anything > else, because of this quirk that data can look like anything. If anyone > can correct me on that, great, but I'd be somewhat surprised. Therefore, > as David intimated, the tools you need are generic tools for handling text, > and you'll have to deal with the formatting yourself. If I were doing a > one-off transform of this file, I'd probably reach for vi... but I'm an old > Unix hacker. I certainly wouldn't teach that tooling. awk or perl could > certainly handle it; or if you want to give students a wider view of the > world you might wish to try ANTLR and get them to write a grammar to parse > the file. The Clojure grammar ( > https://github.com/antlr/grammars-v4/blob/master/clojure/Clojure.g4) would > be an interesting place to start, although Terence Parr's comment of "match > a bunch of crap in parentheses" would probably give a flavour of what to > implement. Depends what else the students are learning. > > Hope this helps rather than hinders. > > - Peter > > On 18 January 2018 at 05:25, Ranjan Maitra <mai...@email.com> wrote: > > > Thanks! I am trying to use it in R. (Actually, I try to give my students > > experiences with different kinds of files and I was wondering if there > were > > tools available for such kinds of files. I don't know Lisp so I do not > > actually know what the lines towards the bottom of the file mean.( > > > > Many thanks for your response! > > > > Best wishes, > > Ranjan > > > > On Wed, 17 Jan 2018 20:59:48 -0800 David Winsemius < > dwinsem...@comcast.net> > > wrote: > > > > > > > > > On Jan 17, 2018, at 8:22 PM, Ranjan Maitra <mai...@email.com> wrote: > > > > > > > > Dear friends, > > > > > > > > Is there a way to read data files written in lisp into R? > > > > > > > > Here is the file: https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ > > ml/machine-learning-databases/university/university.data > > > > > > > > I would like to read it into R. Any suggestions? > > > > > > It's just a text file. What difficulties are you having? > > > > > > > > > > > > Thanks very much in advance for pointers on this and best wishes, > > > > Ranjan > > > > > > > > -- > > > > Important Notice: This mailbox is ignored: e-mails are set to be > > deleted on receipt. Please respond to the mailing list if appropriate. > For > > those needing to send personal or professional e-mail, please use > > appropriate addresses. > > > > > > > > ______________________________________________ > > > > R-help@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. > > > > > > David Winsemius > > > Alameda, CA, USA > > > > > > 'Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.' > > -Gehm's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law > > > > > > ______________________________________________ > > > R-help@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. > > > > > > > > > -- > > Important Notice: This mailbox is ignored: e-mails are set to be deleted > > on receipt. Please respond to the mailing list if appropriate. For those > > needing to send personal or professional e-mail, please use appropriate > > addresses. > > > > ______________________________________________ > > R-help@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. > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@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. > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@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.