How to read a one lined CSV in R? - r

Question

I have been working on a dummy dataset recently and i found out that the data provided to me was all in single line. A similiar example for the same is depicted as follows:
Name,Age,Gender,Occupation A,10,M,Student B,11,M,Student C,11,F,Student
i want to import the data and obtain an output as follows:
Name Age Gender Occupation
A 10 M Student
B 11 M Student
C 12 F Student
a case may arise that a value might be missing. a logic is required to import such data. Can anyone help me out to build a logic behind the import of such data sets.
i tried the normal import but it really didn't helped. just imported the file by read.csv() function and it didn't gave me an expected result.
EDIT: what if the data is like:
Name,Age,Gender,Occupation ABC XYZ,10,M,Student B,11,M,Student C,11,F,Student
and i want an output like:
Name Age Gender Occupation
ABC XYZ 10 M Student
B 11 M Student
C 12 F Student

Answer 1

You could read your file in with readLines, turn spaces into line breaks, and then read it with read.csv:
# txt <- readLines("my_data.txt") # with a real data file
txt <- readLines(textConnection("Name,Age,Gender,Occupation A,10,M,Student B,11,M,Student C,11,F,Student"))
read.csv(text=gsub(" ","\n",txt))
output
Name Age Gender Occupation
1 A 10 M Student
2 B 11 M Student
3 C 11 F Student

Answer 2

If you have millions of records, you will probably want to speed up this process, so I suggest using data.table's fread instead of read.csv, which can also take a shell command to pre-process the file before reading in R, and sed will be a lot faster then doing the string manipulation in R.
Eg if you have this CSV stored at /tmp/x.csv, you can try something like:
> data.table::fread("sed 's/ /\\n/g' /tmp/x.csv")
Name Age Gender Occupation
1: A 10 M Student
2: B 11 M Student
3: C 11 F Student