Hi all, I am trying to read a messy data but facing difficulty. The data has several columns separated by blank space(s). Each column value may have different lengths across the rows. The first row(header) has four columns. However, each row may not have the four column values. For instance, the first data row has only the first two column values. The fourth data row has the first and last column values, the second and the third column values are missing for this row.. How do I read this data set correctly? Here is my sample data set, output and desired output. To make it clear to each data point I have added the row and column numbers. I cannot use fixed width format reading because each row may have different length for a given column.
dat<-read.table(text="x1 x2 x3 x4 1 B22 2 C33 322 B22 D34 4 D44 51 D53 60 D62 ",header=T, fill=T,na.strings=c("","NA")) Output x1 x2 x3 x4 1 1 B12 <NA> NA 2 2 C23 <NA> NA 3 322 B32 D34 NA 4 4 D44 <NA> NA 5 51 D53 <NA> NA 6 60 D62 <NA> NA Desired output x1 x2 x3 x4 1 1 B22 <NA> NA 2 2 <NA> C33 NA 3 322 B32 NA D34 4 4 <NA> NA D44 5 51 <NA> D53 NA 6 60 D62 <NA> NA Thank you, ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.