How to create specefic columns out of text in r - r

Question

Here is just an example I hope you can help me with, given that the input is a line from a txt file, I want to transform it into a table (see output) and save it as a csv or tsv file.
I have tried with separate functions but could not get it right.
Input
"PR7 - Autres produits d'exploitation 6.9 371 667 1 389"
Desired output
Variable
note
2020
2019
2018
PR7 - Autres produits d'exploitation
6.9
371
667
1389

Answer 1

I'm assuming that this badly delimited data-set is the only place where you can read your data.
I created for the purpose of this answer an example file (that I called PR.txt) that contains only the two following lines.
PR6 - Blabla 10 156 3920 245
PR7 - Autres produits d'exploitation 6.9 371 667 1389
First I create a function to parse each line of this data-set. I'm assuming here that the original file does not contain the names of the columns. In reality, this is probably not the case. Thus this function that could be easily adapted to take a first "header" line into account.
readBadlyDelimitedData <- function(x) {
# Read the data
dat <- read.table(text = x)
# Get the type of each column
whatIsIt <- sapply(dat, typeof)
# Combine the columns that are of type "character"
variable <- paste(dat[whatIsIt == "character"], collapse = " ")
# Put everything in a data-frame
res <- data.frame(
variable = variable,
dat[, whatIsIt != "character"])
# Change the names
names(res)[-1] <- c("note", "Year2021", "Year2020", "Year2019")
return(res)
}
Note that I do not call the columns with the yearly figure by only "numeric" names because giving rows or columns purely "numerical" names is not a good practice in R.
Once I have this function, I can (l)apply it to each line of the data by combining it with readLines, and collapse all the lines with an rbind.
out <- do.call("rbind", lapply(readLines("tests/PR.txt"), readBadlyDelimitedData))
out
variable note Year2021
1 PR6 - Blabla 10.0 156
2 PR7 - Autres produits d'exploitation 6.9 371
Year2020 Year2019
1 3920 245
2 667 1389
Finally, I save the result with read.csv :
read.csv(out, file = "correctlyDelimitedFile.csv")
If you can get your hands on the Excel file, a simple gdata::read.xls or openxlsx::read.xlsx would be enough to read the data.
I wish I knew how to make the script simpler... maybe a tidyr magic person would have a more elegant solution?