Having issues loading my data file into R

Question

I am not able to load my data file into R. I have tried every possible function I could find, including so many different variations of read.table and scan.

The file is a .txt file, and contains a block of data. It has no headers, etc. It is simply a set of results contained in a rectangle, with only spaces separating the different results.

When I input the data as if it were a table, and try finding the summary of the data, each row is taken as its own data set. So I end up with 9 different summaries.

I need the data to be recognised as if it were a list of numbers just separated by a comma, but regardless of what I do, I can't seem to do this.

Also, I have a mac (if that effects anything at all).

Any help would be MUCH appreciated. Thank you.

Could you post some dummy data and provide more details on what you have tried so far? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/how-to-make-a-great-r-reproducible-example — r.bot, Apr 14 '15 at 08:06

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 14 '15 at 09:40

Here is another approach. I created text.txt in Word, the data looking like df below but without row numbers or column names. I read it into R with read.table.

df <- read.table("~/R/text.txt", sep = "")
df

  V1 V2 V3 V4
1  1  3  5  7
2  2  4  6  8
3  1  2  3  4
4  5  6  7  8

library("tidyr") # to do what the `melt` function of reshape2 does
df2 <- gather(df)[-1] # arrange all the values in one variable [remove one column]

   value
1      1
2      2
3      1
4      5
5      3
6      4
7      2
8      6
9      5
10     6
11     3
12     7
13     7
14     8
15     4
16     8
summary(df2$value) # calculate the summary statistics

   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
   1.00    2.75    4.50    4.50    6.25    8.00

`as.vector(as.matrix(df))` will do the same – germcd Apr 14 '15 at 10:00 — germcd, Apr 14 '15 at 10:00

musically_ut · Answer 2 · 2015-04-14T08:55:11.250

If I correctly understand your question, then you want to read the following (which is in a file, say ~/tmp/spaced-data.dsv):

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

as a single vector: c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).

If your file is not very large, then you can do the following:

> read.csv( text=paste0(readLines('~/tmp/spaced-data.dsv'), collapse=' '), 
            header=F, 
            sep=' '
          )
  V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8 V9
1  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9

Having issues loading my data file into R

2 Answers2