Reading a dat file in R - r

I am trying to read a dat file with ";" separated. I want to read a specific line that starts with certain characters like "B" and the other line are not the matter of interest. Can anyone guide me.
I have tried using the read_delim, read.table and read.csv2.But since some lines are not of equal length. So, I am getting errors.
file <- read.table(file = '~/file.DAT',header = FALSE, quote = "\"'",dec = ".",numerals = c("no.loss"),sep = ';',text)
I am expecting a r dataframe out of this file which I can write it to a csv file again.

You should be able to do that through readLines
allLines <- readLines(con = file('~/file.DAT'), 'r')
grepB <- function(x) grepl('^B',x)
BLines <- filter(grepB, allLines)
df <- as.data.frame(strsplit(BLines, ";"))
And if your file contains header, then you can specify
names(df) <- strsplit(allLines[1], ";")[[1]]

Related

How can I read a table in a loosely structured text file into a data frame in R?

Take a look at the "Estimated Global Trend daily values" file on this NOAA web page. It is a .txt file with something like 50 header lines (identified with leading #s) followed by several thousand lines of tabular data. The link to download the file is embedded in the code below.
How can I read this file so that I end up with a data frame (or tibble) with the appropriate column names and data?
All the text-to-data functions I know get stymied by those header lines. Here's what I just tried, riffing off of this SO Q&A. My thought was to read the file into a list of lines, then drop the lines that start with # from the list, then do.call(rbind, ...) the rest. The downloading part at the top works fine, but when I run the function, I'm getting back an empty list.
temp <- paste0(tempfile(), ".txt")
download.file("ftp://aftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/products/trends/co2/co2_trend_gl.txt",
destfile = temp, mode = "wb")
processFile = function(filepath) {
dat_list <- list()
con = file(filepath, "r")
while ( TRUE ) {
line = readLines(con, n = 1)
if ( length(line) == 0 ) {
break
}
append(dat_list, line)
}
close(con)
return(dat_list)
}
dat_list <- processFile(temp)
Here's a possible alternative
processFile = function(filepath, header=TRUE, ...) {
lines <- readLines(filepath)
comments <- which(grepl("^#", lines))
header_row <- gsub("^#","",lines[tail(comments,1)])
data <- read.table(text=c(header_row, lines[-comments]), header=header, ...)
return(data)
}
processFile(temp)
The idea is that we read in all the lines, find the ones that start with "#" and ignore them except for the last one which will be used as the header. We remove the "#" from the header (otherwise it's usually treated as a comment) and then pass it off to read.table to parse the data.
Here are a few options that bypass your function and that you can mix & match.
In the easiest (albeit unlikely) scenario where you know the column names already, you can use read.table and enter the column names manually. The default option of comment.char = "#" means those comment lines will be omitted.
read.table(temp, col.names = c("year", "month", "day", "cycle", "trend"))
More likely is that you don't know those column names, but can get them by figuring out how many comment lines there are, then reading just the last of those lines. That saves you having to read more of the file than you need; this is a small enough file that it shouldn't make a huge difference, but in a larger file it might. I'm doing the counting by accessing the command line, only because that's the way I know how. Note also that I saved the file at an easier path; you could instead paste the command together with the temp variable.
Again, the comments are omitted by default.
n_comments <- as.numeric(system("grep '^# ' co2.txt | wc -l", intern = TRUE))
hdrs <- scan(temp, skip = n_comments - 1, nlines = 1, what = "character")[-1]
read.table(temp, col.names = hdrs)
Or with dplyr and stringr, read all the lines, separate out the comments to extract column names, then filter to remove the comment lines and separate into fields, assigning the column names you've just pulled out. Again, with a bigger file, this could become burdensome.
library(dplyr)
lines <- data.frame(text = readLines(temp), stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
comments <- lines %>%
filter(stringr::str_detect(text, "^#"))
hdrs <- strsplit(comments[nrow(comments), 1], "\\s+")[[1]][-1]
lines %>%
filter(!stringr::str_detect(text, "^#")) %>%
mutate(text = trimws(text)) %>%
tidyr::separate(text, into = hdrs, sep = "\\s+") %>%
mutate_all(as.numeric)

Combine csv files with common file identifier

I have a list of approximately 500 csv files each with a filename that consists of a six-digit number followed by a year (ex. 123456_2015.csv). I would like to append all files together that have the same six-digit number. I tried to implement the code suggested in this question:
Import and rbind multiple csv files with common name in R but I want the appended data to be saved as new csv files in the same directory as the original files are currently saved. I have also tried to implement the below code however the csv files produced from this contain no data.
rm(list=ls())
filenames <- list.files(path = "C:/Users/smithma/Desktop/PM25_test")
NAPS_ID <- gsub('.+?\\([0-9]{5,6}?)\\_.+?$', '\\1', filenames)
Unique_NAPS_ID <- unique(NAPS_ID)
n <- length(Unique_NAPS_ID)
for(j in 1:n){
curr_NAPS_ID <- as.character(Unique_NAPS_ID[j])
NAPS_ID_pattern <- paste(".+?\\_(", curr_NAPS_ID,"+?)\\_.+?$", sep = "" )
NAPS_filenames <- list.files(path = "C:/Users/smithma/Desktop/PM25_test", pattern = NAPS_ID_pattern)
write.csv(do.call("rbind", lapply(NAPS_filenames, read.csv, header = TRUE)),file = paste("C:/Users/smithma/Desktop/PM25_test/MERGED", "MERGED_", Unique_NAPS_ID[j], ".csv", sep = ""), row.names=FALSE)
}
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Because you're not doing any data manipulation, you don't need to treat the files like tabular data. You only need to copy the file contents.
filenames <- list.files("C:/Users/smithma/Desktop/PM25_test", full.names = TRUE)
NAPS_ID <- substr(basename(filenames), 1, 6)
Unique_NAPS_ID <- unique(NAPS_ID)
for(curr_NAPS_ID in Unique_NAPS_ID){
NAPS_filenames <- filenames[startsWith(basename(filenames), curr_NAPS_ID)]
output_file <- paste0(
"C:/Users/nwerth/Desktop/PM25_test/MERGED_", curr_NAPS_ID, ".csv"
)
for (fname in NAPS_filenames) {
line_text <- readLines(fname)
# Write the header from the first file
if (fname == NAPS_filenames[1]) {
cat(line_text[1], '\n', sep = '', file = output_file)
}
# Append every line in the file except the header
line_text <- line_text[-1]
cat(line_text, file = output_file, sep = '\n', append = TRUE)
}
}
My changes:
list.files(..., full.names = TRUE) is usually the best way to go.
Because the digits appear at the start of the filenames, I suggest substr. It's easier to get an idea of what's going on when skimming the code.
Instead of looping over the indices of a vector, loop over the values. It's more succinct and less likely to cause problems if the vector's empty.
startsWith and endsWith are relatively new functions, and they're great.
You only care about copying lines, so just use readLines to get them in and cat to get them out.
You might consider something like this:
##will take the first 6 characters of each file name
six.digit.filenames <- substr(filenames, 1,6)
path <- "C:/Users/smithma/Desktop/PM25_test/"
unique.numbers <- unique(six.digit.filenames)
for(j in unique.numbers){
sub <- filenames[which(substr(filenames,1,6) == j)]
data.for.output <- c()
for(file in sub){
##now do your stuff with these files including read them in
data <- read.csv(paste0(path,file))
data.for.output <- rbind(data.for.output,data)
}
write.csv(data.for.output,paste0(path,j, '.csv'), row.names = F)
}

R - write.table overwrites file

My script reads in a list of text files from a folder. A calculation for all values in a few columns in each text file is made.
At the end I want to write the resulting data.frame into a new text file in a different location.
The problem is, that the script keeps overwriting the file it created before. So I end up with only one file (the last one that was read in).
But I don't get what I am doing wrong here. The output file name is different each time, so in my head it should produce separate files.
The script looks as follows:
RAW <- "C:/path/tofiles"
files <- list.files(RAW, full.names = TRUE)
for(j in length(files)) {
if(file.exists(files[[j]])){
data <- read.csv(files[[j]], skip = 0, header=FALSE)
data[9] <- do.call(cbind,lapply(data[9], function(x){(data[9]*0.01701)/0.00848}))
data[11] <- do.call(cbind,lapply(data[11], function(x){(data[11]*0.01834)/0.00848}))
data[13] <- do.call(cbind,lapply(data[13], function(x){(data[13]*0.00982)/0.00848}))
data[15] <- do.call(cbind,lapply(data[15], function(x){(data[15]*0.01011)/0.00848}))
OUT <- paste("C:/path/to/destination_folder",basename(files[[j]]),sep="")
write.table(data, OUT, sep=",", row.names = FALSE, col.names = FALSE, append = FALSE)
}
}
The problem is in your for loop. length(files) just provides 1 value, namely the length of your files-vector, while I think you want to have a sequence with that length.
Try seq_along or just for(j in files).

From csv to txt

How can i convert a csv file to a plain text file?
My CSV file consists of 3 columns and i only want to get the values of the column "Text" in the text file. I tried to achieve this with the following:
name <- read.csv('c:/Users/bi2/Documents/TextminingRfiles/ScoreOutput/RangersScores.csv', header=T, sep=",")
attach(name)
posText <- name[score > 0,]> name <- read.csv('c:/Users/bi2/Documents/TextminingRfiles/ScoreOutput/RangersScores.csv', header=T, sep=",")
attach(name)
posText <- name[score > 0,]
write(posText$text, file = "C:/Users/bi2/Documents/TextminingRfiles/ScoreOutput/namePositive.txt", sep="")
This code only copies the indexes to the text file, but not the text values of the text column. How can i fix this?
Tnx for your help.
A few extra arguments to write.table will probably get what you want.
Here's a reproducible example, make a CSV with three columns...
write.csv(data.frame(x = sample(26),
y = sample(26),
text = letters),
file = "test.csv")
Now read it into R...
test <- read.csv("test.csv")
Now do your other calculations, then subset to get only the column you want to write to a txt file...
test <- test[ ,which(names(test) == 'text')]
And now write it to a txt file, with no row names, column names or quote marks...
write.table(test, "test.txt",
row.names = FALSE,
quote = FALSE,
col.names = FALSE)
By the way, the attaching in the code in your question is unnecessary and not recommended.

Get filename from read.csv(file.choose( ))

I'm wondering if it would be possible to draw out out the filename from a file.choose() command embedded within a read.csv call. Right now I'm doing this in two steps, but the user has to select the same file twice in order to extract both the data (csv) and the filename for use in a function I run. I want to make it so the user only has to select the file once, and then I can use both the data and the name of the file.
Here's what I'm working with:
data <- read.csv(file.choose(), skip=1))
name <- basename(file.choose())
I'm running OS X if that helps, since I think file.choose() has different behavior depending on the OS. Thanks in advance.
Why you use an embedded file.choose() command?
filename <- file.choose()
data <- read.csv(filename, skip=1)
name <- basename(filename)
use this:
df = read.csv(file.choose(), sep = "<use relevant seperator>", header = T, quote = "")
seperators are generally comma , or fullstop .
Example:
df = read.csv(file.choose(), sep = ",", header = T, quote = "")
#
Use :
df = df[,!apply(is.na(df), 2, all)] # works for every data format
to remove blank columns to the left

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