On 25-Sep-07 20:39:11, lucy b wrote:
> Dear List,
>
> I have an ascii text file with data I'd like to extract. Example:
>
> Year Built: 1873 Gross Building Area: 578 sq ft
> Total Rooms: 6 Living Area: 578 sq ft
>
> There is a lot of data I'd like to ignore in each record, so I'm
> hoping there is a way to use strings as delimiters to get the data I
> want (e.g. tell R to take data between "Built:" and "Gross" -
> incidentally, not always numeric). I think an ugly way would be to
> start at the end of each record and use a substitution expression to
> chip away at it, but I'm afraid it will take forever to run. Is there
> a way to use strings as delimiters in an expression?
>
> Thanks in advance for ideas.
>
> LB
The scope of what you're trying to achieve is not clear,
though on the basis of your examples above you'd have to
use a different separator pattern for each type of line.
For your first example, a simple method is on the lines of
gsub(".*Built:" , "",
"Year Built: 1873 Gross Building Area: 578 sq ft")
[1] " 1873 Gross Building Area: 578 sq ft"
and then just take the first white-space-delimited field
from the result.
Best wishes,
Ted.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Date: 25-Sep-07 Time: 23:20:01
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