HI, " btw, could this program be modified such that it take direct input from my input.txt file???"
Lines1<-readLines("utpalmtbl.txt") Lines1 #[1] "OG1: or10|1345 or10|387 or10|474 or11|1203 or11|182 or10|2158 or12|637" #[2] "OG2: or10|1562 or10|1584 or10|1977 or11|2263 or11|43" #[3] "OG3: or12|2400 or12|2401 or13|2697 or13|2698 or16|2 or16|914 or27|1355" #[4] "OG4: or10|108 or20|2713 or25|2315 or25|2754 or2|1411" library(stringr) res<-paste(gsub("(.*\\:).*","\\1",Lines1),unlist(lapply(str_match_all(Lines1,"or10\\|\\d+"),paste,collapse=" ")),sep=" ") res #[1] "OG1: or10|1345 or10|387 or10|474 or10|2158" #[2] "OG2: or10|1562 or10|1584 or10|1977" #[3] "OG3: " #[4] "OG4: or10|108" write.table(res,"res.txt",row.names=FALSE,col.names=FALSE,quote=FALSE) Lines2<- readLines("res.txt") Lines2 #[1] "OG1: or10|1345 or10|387 or10|474 or10|2158" #[2] "OG2: or10|1562 or10|1584 or10|1977" #[3] "OG3: " #[4] "OG4: or10|108" I hope this helps. A.K. ______________________________________________ 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.