It is a bit unclear from your posting exactly what your data is. I'm assuming that you have an R dataset, a single character string called Data, made with a command like Dat = "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15" (If you have a file, say "Dat.R", containing those three lines of text then run source("Dat.R") and you be in the above situation.)
I'm also assuming that you want to intuit the number of columns in the matrix from the layout of numbers in the string contained in Dat. Your string contained blank lines between every "real" line. I suspect someone's mailer put them there, but you can get rid of them with tDat <- gsub("\n+", "\n", Dat) Next, break your string into "lines" and then each line into "words" so you can count the number of entries in each line and make sure there are the the same number of entries in each line. lines <- strsplit(tDat, "\n")[[1]] words <- strsplit(lines, "[[:space:]]+") nWordsPerLine <- unique(vapply(words, FUN=length, FUN.VALUE=0)) stopifnot(length(nWordsPerLine) ==1) Finally, convert the "words" to numbers and make the matrix m <- matrix(as.numeric(unlist(words)), ncol=nWordsPerLine, byrow=TRUE) print(m) [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [1,] 1 2 3 4 5 [2,] 6 7 8 9 10 [3,] 11 12 13 14 15 Bill Dunlap Spotfire, TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com > -----Original Message----- > From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On > Behalf Of Bogaso > Christofer > Sent: Saturday, March 03, 2012 7:15 AM > To: r-help@r-project.org > Subject: [R] How to read this data properly? > > Dear all, I have been given a data something like below: > > > > Dat = "2 3 28.3 3.05 8 3 3 22.5 1.55 0 1 1 26.0 2.30 9 3 3 24.8 2.10 0 > > 3 3 26.0 2.60 4 2 3 23.8 2.10 0 3 2 24.7 1.90 0 2 1 23.7 1.95 0 > > 3 3 25.6 2.15 0 3 3 24.3 2.15 0 2 3 25.8 2.65 0 2 3 28.2 3.05 11 > > 4 2 21.0 1.85 0 2 1 26.0 2.30 14 1 1 27.1 2.95 8 2 3 25.2 2.00 1 > > 2 3 29.0 3.00 1 4 3 24.7 2.20 0 2 3 27.4 2.70 5 2 2 23.2 1.95 4" > > > > > > I want to create a matrix out of those data for my further calculations. I > have tried with readLines() but got error: > > > > > readLines(Dat) > > Error in file(con, "r") : cannot open the connection > > In addition: Warning message: > > In file(con, "r") : > > cannot open file '2 3 28.3 3.05 8 3 3 22.5 1.55 0 1 1 26.0 2.30 9 3 3 24.8 > 2.10 0 > > 3 3 26.0 2.60 4 2 3 23.8 2.10 0 3 2 24.7 1.90 0 2 1 23.7 1.95 0 > > 3 3 25.6 2.15 0 3 3 24.3 2.15 0 2 3 25.8 2.65 0 2 3 28.2 3.05 11 > > 4 2 21.0 1.85 0 2 1 26.0 2.30 14 1 1 27.1 2.95 8 2 3 25.2 2.00 1 > > 2 3 29.0 3.00 1 4 3 24.7 2.20 0 2 3 27.4 2.70 5 2 2 23.2 1.95 4': No such > file or directory > > > > > > Can somebody help to put that data in some workable format? > > > > Thanks and regards, > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > 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. ______________________________________________ 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.