Dear all Lets say I have a plain text file as follows:
> cat(c("[ID: 001 ] [Writer: Steven Moffat ] [Rating: 8.9 ] Doctor Who", + "[ID: 002 ] [Writer: Joss Whedon ] [Rating: 8.8 ] Buffy", + "[ID: 003 ] [Writer: J. Michael Straczynski ] [Rating: 7.4 ] Babylon [5]"), + sep = "\n", file = "tmp.txt") I would somehow like to read in this file to R and covert it into a data frame like this: > DF <- data.frame(ID = c("001", "002", "003"), + Writer = c("Steven Moffat", "Joss Whedon", "J. Michael Straczynski"), + Rating = c("8.9", "8.8", "7.4"), + Text = c("Doctor Who", "Buffy", "Babylon [5]"), stringsAsFactors = FALSE) My initial thoughts were to use readLines on the text file and maybe do some regular expressions and also use strsplit(..); but having confused myself after several attempts I was wondering if there is a way, perhaps using maybe read.table instead? My end goal is to hopefully convert DF into an XML structure. Thank you kindly in advance for your time, Tony Breyal # Windows Vista > sessionInfo() R version 2.11.0 (2010-04-22) i386-pc-mingw32 locale: [1] LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252 LC_CTYPE=English_United Kingdom.1252 LC_MONETARY=English_United Kingdom.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom. 1252 attached base packages: [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base other attached packages: [1] XML_2.8-1 loaded via a namespace (and not attached): [1] tools_2.11.0 ______________________________________________ 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.