R: Read Fixed Width Format Files

read.fwf {base}

R Documentation

Read Fixed Width Format Files

Description

Read a ``table'' of fixed width formatted data into a data.frame.

Usage

read.fwf(file, widths, sep=" ", as.is = FALSE,
         skip = 0, row.names, col.names)

Arguments

`file`	the name of the file which the data are to be read from. Each row of the table appears as one line of the file.
`widths`	integer vector, giving the widths of the fixed-width fields (of one line).
`sep`	character; the separator used internally; should be irrelevant.
`as.is`	see `read.table`.
`skip`	number of initial lines to skip; see `read.table`.
`row.names`	see `read.table`.
`col.names`	see `read.table`.

Value

A data.frame as by read.table which is called internally.

Note

This function currently relies on the Perl script `$R_HOME/bin/fwf2table'. Therefore, it will only work in an environment with Perl 5 installed, see `INSTALL' in the top-level directory of the sources.

Author(s)

Kurt Hornik hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at

Examples

ff <- tempfile()
cat(file=ff, "123456", "987654", sep="\n")
read.fwf(ff, width=c(1,2,3))    #> 1 23 456 \ 9 87 654
unlink(ff)

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