Hello R wizards,
What is the best way to read a data file containing both fixed-width and
tab-delimited files? (More detail follows.)
_*Details:*_
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics provides local area unemployment
statistics at ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/time.series/la/, and the data are
I tried to shoehorn the read.* functions and match both the fixed width and
the variable width fields
in the data but it doesn't seem evident to me. (read.fwf reads fixed width
data properly but the rest
of the fields must be processed separately -- maybe insert NULL stubs in the
remaining fields
Ah, I should have mentioned this. Personally I work on Macs (Leopard)
and PC's (XP Pro and XP Pro x64). Even though the PC's do have Cygwin,
I'm trying to make this code portable. So I want to avoid such things as
sed, perl, etc.
I want to do this in R, even if processing is a bit slower.
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