Formatting Header to Append to Data Frame in R - r

I'm attempting to create a specifically formatted header to append to a data frame I have created in R.
The essence of my problem is that it seems increasingly difficult (maybe impossible?) to create a header that breaks away from a typical one row by one column framework, without merging the underlying table, using the dataframe concept in R.
The issue stems from me not being able to figure out a way to import this particular format of a header into R through methods such as read.csv or read.xlsx which preserve the format of the header.
Reading in a header of this format into R from a .csv or .xlsx is quite ugly and doesn't preserve the original format. The format of the header I'm trying to create and append to an already existing dataframe I have of 17 nameless columns in R could be represented in such a way:
Where the number series of 1 - 17 represents the already existing data frame of 17 nameless columns of data that I have created in R in which I wish to append to this header. Could anyone point me in the right direction?

You are correct that this header will not work within R. The data frame only supports single header values and wont do something akin to a merged cell in excel.
However if you simply want to export your data to an .csv or .xlsx (use write.csv) then just copy your header in, that could work.
OR
You could add in a factor column to your data frame to capture the information contained in the top level of your header.

Related

R Code: csv file data incorrectly breaking across lines

I have some csv data that I'm trying to read in, where lines are breaking across rows weirdly.
An example of the file (the files are the same but the date varies) is here: http://nemweb.com.au/Reports/Archive/DispatchIS_Reports/PUBLIC_DISPATCHIS_20211118.zip
The csv is non-rectangular because there's 4 different types of data included, each with their own heading rows. I can't skip a certain number of lines because the length of the data varies by date.
The data that I want is the third dataset (sometimes the second), and has approximately twice the number of headers as the data above it. So I use read.csv() without a header and ideally it should pull all data and fill NAs above.
But for some reason read.csv() seems to decide that there's 28 columns of data (corresponding to the data headers on row 2) which splits the data lower down across three rows - so instead of the data headers being on one row, it splits across three; and so does all the rows of data below it.
I tried reading it in with the column names explicitly defined, it's still splitting the rows weirdly
I can't figure out what's going on - if I open the csv file in Excel it looks perfectly normal.
If I use readr::read_lines() there's no errant carriage returns or new lines as far as I can tell.
Hoping someone might have some guidance, otherwise I'll have to figure out a kind of nasty read_lines approach.

Import excel (csv) data into R conducting bioinformatics task

I'm a new who is exploring bioinformatics via R. Right now I've encounter a trouble, where I imported my data in excel into R through changing it into csv format and using read.csv command, as you see in the pic there are 37 variables (column) where first column is supposed to be considered as fixed factor. And I would like to match it with another matirx which has only 36 variables in the downstream processing, what should I do to reduce variable numbers by fixing first column?
Many thanks in advance.
sure, I added str() properties of my data here.
If I am not mistaken, what you are looking for is setting the "Gene" column as metadata, indicating what gene those values in every row correspond to. You can try then to delete the word "Gene" in the Excel file because when you import it with the read.csv() function, the argument row.names = TRUE is set as default when "there is a header and the first row contains one fewer field than the number of columns".
You can find more information about this function using ?read.csv

I am importing a csv table into R but it takes my observations as variables

I imported a csv file into R. The first column has my observations and I have 5 variables. However, when I import it into R it takes my column of observations as a variable, and tells me I have 6 variables. How do I make it understand that the first column of "cars" is a column of observations? I attach a picture for reference.
Thank you,
Marianaenter image description here
You should be able to specify this with the row.names parameter in read.csv. Although I can't say exactly what to type since I don't have the original dataset, it should be something like:
read.csv(file = "myfile.csv", row.names = 1, [other options])
indicating that row names can be found in the first column.
If you're using some other method of importing the file (e.g. by using the RStudio graphical interface), there should be an option somewhere along the way to specify the location of row names.
Alternatively, a possibly easier approach is suggested by the read.csv documentation:
If row.names is not specified and the header line has one less entry than the number of columns, the first column is taken to be the row names. This allows data frames to be read in from the format in which they are printed. If row.names is specified and does not refer to the first column, that column is discarded from such files.
Try deleting the X in the top left corner of your .csv file (and delete the comma that follows it) and see if that gets you anywhere.
EDIT Marius has the right suggestion, by the way - just ignore the junk column and work with row numbers instead. (What's the harm?)

Read Excel file in R with multiple date format

I'm trying to read an Excel file in R, with two columns containing dates. Now here is my problem, when I view my data file in R, most of the dates are in the good format, but some were transformed into number that don't make sense at all. I joined images to show the different outputs from R/Excel.
(Only pay attention to the columns "ArrivalDate" and ActlFlightDate")
Output seen from R
Output seen from Excel
My question is, how, in R, can I make those numbers become the date they are supposed to be? Especially since the class of the elements in those columns are characters.
Thank you in advance!
Your dates in your excel file are different formats. That is why some are to left side of column and some are to right side of column in the spreadsheet. They are probably mixed between an actual excel date format and a text or general. You should copy the columns to new columns and highlight the new column and right click and change format until all your dates are uniform. Then you can import to R and have consistent dates data.

R XLConnect getting index/formula to a chunk of data using content found in first cell

Sorry if this is difficult to understand - I don't have enough karma to add a picture so I will do the best I can to describe this! Using XLConnect package within R to read & write from/to Excel spreadsheets.
I am working on a project in which I am trying to take columns of data out of many workbooks and concatenate them together into rows of a new workbook based on which workbook they came from (each workbook is data from a consecutive business day). The snag is that the data that I seek is only a small part (10 rows X 3 columns) of each workbook/worksheet and is not always located in the same place within the worksheet due to sloppiness on behalf of the person who originally created the spreadsheets. (e.g. I can't just start at cell A2 because the dataset that starts at A2 in one workbook might start at B12 or C3 in another workbook).
I am wondering if it is possible to search for a cell based on its contents (e.g. a cell containing the title "Table of Arb Prices") and return either the index or reference formula to be able to access that cell.
Also wondering if, once I reference that cell based on its contents, if there is a way to adjust that formula to get to where I know another cell is compared to that one. For example if a cell with known contents is always located 2 rows above and 3 columns to the left of the cell where I wish to start collecting data, is it possible for me to take that first reference formula and increment it by 2 rows and 3 columns to get the reference formula for the cell I want?
Thanks for any help and please advise me if you need further information to be able to understand my questions!
You can just read the entire worksheet in as a matrix with something like
library(XLConnect)
demoExcelFile <- system.file("demoFiles/mtcars.xlsx", package = "XLConnect")
mm <- as.matrix(readWorksheetFromFile(demoExcelFile, sheet=1))
class(mm)<-"character" # convert all to character
Then you can search for values and get the row/colum
which(mm=="3.435", arr.ind=T)
# row col
# [1,] 23 6
Then you can offset those and extract values from the matrix how ever you like. In the end, when you know where you want to read from, you can convert to a cleaner data frame with
read.table(text=apply(mm[25:27, 6:8],1,paste, collapse="\t"), sep="\t")
Hopefully that gives you a general idea of something you can try. It's hard to be more specific without knowing exactly what your input data looks like.

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