Hi, I know how to read fixed width format data with read.fwf, but suddenly I need to read in a large number of old fwf files with 2 types of lines. Lines that begin with "3" in first column carry one set of variables, and lines that begin with "4" carry another set, like this:
… 3A00206546L070049016090045 99 1015002 001001008010004002004007003 001 3A00206546L070049006090030 99 1029001002001001006014002 3A00206546L070049002290004 99 1015 001001 3A00206546L070049001692559049033 1015 018036024 3A00206546L070049002290004 99 1001 002 4A00176546L068047090010111000606516400150010000001501063 065914 4A00176546L06804709001011100040761600000000 1092 095614 4A00196546L098000100010111001706214400005010000000051062 065914 4A00176546L06804709001011100050591300000000 1062 065914 4A00196546L098000100010111002604721400020010000000201042 046114 4A00196546L098000100010111002504221400005012000000051042 046114 4A00196546L098000100010111002903721400050012200000501032 036214 … I have searched for tricks to do this but I must not have used the right keywords, I found nothing. I suppose I could read the entire file as a single character variable for each line, then subset for lines that begin with 3 and save this in an ascii file that will then be reopened with a read.fwf call, and do the same with lines that begin with 4. But this does not appear to me to be very elegant nor efficient… Is there a better method? Thanks in advance, Denis Chabot ______________________________________________ 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.
