Hi, There might be better ways, but here's something that might help you get started. Obviously you'll need to tweak a lot of things. If your files do not have a uniform number of columns and the column you want is not always in the same position, it may be easier to just read it all in and then extract the column by name ocne they are in R.
# a little sample data var1 var2 var3 54 6326 45 66 3452 44 52 5436 43 64 7865 48 54 6534 44 #how you can read in just one column read.table("clipboard", header = TRUE, sep = " ", colClasses = c("NULL", "integer", "NULL")) #Grab a files in your WD that have .txt in them file.names <- grep(".txt", list.files(), value = TRUE) #Initialize a list to store all the file you read in mydata <- vector("list", length = length(file.names)) #Read in data files and assign them to your list for(i in seq_along(file.names)) { mydata[[i]] <- read.table(file = file.names[i], sep = " ", colClasses = c("NULL", "integer", "NULL")) } Cheers, Josh On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 11:22 AM, LogLord <nils.sch...@web.de> wrote: > > Hi, > > I have about 300 space-delimited text files and from each file I want to > import one specific column into R to create a data frame where all imported > columns are included. > Is there a smart way to do so? > > Thanks! > -- > View this message in context: > http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Import-of-specific-column-of-many-space-delimited-text-files-tp2293273p2293273.html > Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > 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. > -- Joshua Wiley Ph.D. Student, Health Psychology University of California, Los Angeles http://www.joshuawiley.com/ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list 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.