On 3/8/06 6:43 AM, "Philipp Pagel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 12:32:28PM +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> I'm trying to read a text data file that contains several records
>> separated by a blank line. Each record starts with a row that contains
>> it's ID and the number of rows for the records (two columns), then the
>> data table itself, e.g.
>>
>> 123 5
>> 89.1791 1.1024
>> 90.5735 1.1024
>> 92.5666 1.1024
>> 95.0725 1.1024
>> 101.2070 1.1024
>>
>> 321 3
>> 60.1601 1.1024
>> 64.8023 1.1024
>> 70.0593 2.1502
>
> That sound like a job for awk. I think it will be much easier to
> transform the data into a flat table using awk, python or perl an then
> just read the table with R.
If you want to use R, you can use a simple combination of
readLines(con,n=1), strsplit on tabs, and simple if statements (to find
blank lines and start new records) to do parse these types of files. I
thought this would be slow, but I do it in one of my own packages and find
that it is pretty fast.
Sean
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