Custom column design - r

I have a raw dataset and the columns are not clearly defined at all. When I go to import the data using "Read.Table" in R, it automatically tries to approximate where the columns begin and end. But it is not correct. I know the number of characters per variable, but I am not sure how to customize them as one would in Excel(=Left(x,3) OR =MID(X,4,1)... etc.). Some variables are separated by spaces, some aren't. It is not consistent.
FYI: The document was originally ".dat", then I saved the file as a ".R" file.
Here is an example of my data
Any help is much appreciated! Let me know

You can use read_fwf from the great readr package, to specify the fix widths per variable.

Related

Import only specific cells from Excel to R by hard coding

I have around 100 equal .xls files containing 10 sheets each, with very messy data, here is a thought example of one sheet:
I want to add everything together in one R dataframe/tibble.
I don't know the right approach here, but I believe that I can hard code this within readxl::read.xls. It should look like this
I would like if somebody could show a short code of how to pick a cell to be the column name by its position and the data belonging to that column, also by its position/range.
Afterwards, I will find a way to loop this to all sheets within all files, or better: If I can specify the needed code for a certain sheet name within the read.xls function. Then i only have to loop on all the files.
Thanks and let me know if you need some more information on this.

Is there a way to extract a substring from a cell in OpenOffice Calc?

I have tens of thousands of rows of unstructured data in csv format. I need to extract certain product attributes from a long string of text. Given a set of acceptable attributes, if there is a match, I need it to fill in the cell with the match.
Example data:
"[ROOT];Earrings;Brands;Brands>JeweleryExchange;Earrings>Gender;Earrings>Gemstone;Earrings>Metal;Earrings>Occasion;Earrings>Style;Earrings>Gender>Women's;Earrings>Gemstone>Zircon;Earrings>Metal>White Gold;Earrings>Occasion>Just to say: I Love You;Earrings>Style>Drop/Dangle;Earrings>Style>Fashion;Not Visible;Gifts;Gifts>Price>$500 - $1000;Gifts>Shop>Earrings;Gifts>Occasion;Gifts>Occasion>Christmas;Gifts>Occasion>Just to say: I Love You;Gifts>For>Her"
Look up table of values:
Zircon, Diamond, Pearl, Ruby
Output:
Zircon
I tried using the VLOOKUP() function, but it needs to match an entire cell and works better for translating acronyms. Haven't really found a built in function that accomplishes what I need. The data is totally unstructured, and changes from row to row with no consistency even within variations of the same product. Does anyone have an idea how to do this?? Or how to write an OpenOffice Calc function to accomplish this? Also open to other better methods of doing this if anyone has any experience or ideas in how to approach this...
ok so I figured out how to do this on my own... I created many different columns, each with a keyword I was looking to extract as a header.
Spreadsheet solution for structured data extraction
Then I used this formula to extract the keywords into the correct row beneath the column header. =IF(ISERROR(SEARCH(CF$1,$D769)),"",CF$1) The Search function returns a number value for the position of a search string otherwise it produces an error. I use the iserror function to determine if there is an error condition, and the if statement in such a way that if there is an error, it leaves the cell blank, else it takes the value of the header. Had over 100 columns of specific information to extract, into one final column where I join all the previous cells in the row together for the final list. Worked like a charm. Recommend this approach to anyone who has to do a similar task.

Exporting data from R that is in a list generated by a function

So I've used the decompose function and I want to export all the lists it generates not just the plot it creates. I tried converting the lists into either a matrix or data frame but then that gets rid of the date header and year columns so if someone knows how to convert it and keep the list formatting that would solve my issue I think.
Anyway, The closest I've got to being able to do this keeping the list format is by doing
capture.output(decompose, file = "filename.csv")
As you can see from the image attached though:
Sometimes the months arent all together in a row which is really not helpful or what I want. It also just puts it in one column and I'm having to go into the excel after and do the text to column option which is going to get old really quickly.
Any help would be greatly appriciated. I'm really new to R so apologise if there is an obvious fix I'm missing.

R studio wont recognize my variables? any ideas why?

So I imported the file and saved it as Purity and its clearly imported. I tried t-test but it doesn't recognize my variables. I tried using the names function to retrieve the variable names and its exactly what I'm entering, V1 and V2. I also tried with Lab-1 and Lab-2. I also tried just using dataset=Purity, all to no avail.
I took a screenshot so as to show code and that data is in the studio, can anyone tell me why this is not working?
apologies if this is painfully obvious I was only introduced to R for stats last week and am still a beginner, also don't have much experience with programming in general. I have looked at other similar problems but just cant see why mine aren't being recognised and others are.
You've got 2 issues here:
1). You don't show how you imported the dataset but you need to either remove the first row or (better) name the columns correctly. I'm assuming you imported the data with read.table(). If so, then include the argument header = TRUE when you import the data.
2). You need to tell R where you want it to get Lab-1 and Lab-2 from.
with(Purity, t.test(Lab-1, Lab-2, paired = TRUE))
r is case sensitive. It looks like your script is using a lowercase 'v" when its an upper case "V" in your variable names.
The problem is in the way you have named your variable. r doesn't recognise the hyphen (-) as a legitimate part of a variable name. Try using underscore (_) instead.

Specify end of record (EOL) delimiter while importing from a text file?

I'm trying to import into R a large number of pipe-delimited files that were created in a windows environment, with CR+LF as the end of record (=EOL) delimiter. However, they also have CR's scattered about periodically, which is resulting in frequent inappropriately-split lines. Ideally, want an efficient way to solve this problem from within R - either by finding a way to specify the EOL delimiter when I import, or, if necessary, by reading in the text file and excising the CRs before any parsing of lines is done.
The creators of the files comment on this problem and recommend adding "TERMSTR= CRLF" into your SAS code, and I can find lots of discussions of how to do this in other languages as well. For R, however, all I can find is this discussion, here on stackoverflow:
Possible to change the record delimiter in R?
The sample problem given is a great match for my problem. The solution identified is nice for their specific situation of having a single file like this, but for me would require coding up separate scripts for importing each of the dozens of files, since each have different primary keys that would need to be recognized after the fact to repair the inappropriate import. Alternatively, I could open each file in something like Notebook++ to remove the extra CR's but again, that seems quite inefficient, and then would have to be repeated by hand every time the initial data set was updated by its producers.
Given how frequent a problem this seems to be for people, and the existence of hard-coded solutions in other programming languages, I'm confused as to why there isn't a fix in R and feel like I must be missing something. It seems clear (I think?) that there's no way to do this directly from read.table or even from readLines, but is there a way perhaps to do this using scan, that I'm missing?
Thanks for any thoughts!

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