Exporting value to specific line and column in a text file - r

I'd like to export random value defined in R as vector (or any other object) to a specific location in a text file. With the use of read.fwf I managed to read the data that is not csv or tab delineated (based on location in file), but no I can not find a suitable way to write/export some random value in the selected (defined) line/row and column in a txt file. I would appreciate any help or suggestions. I was looking to write.table, sink and also some other options for data export, but none of them worked or at least I was not able to complete the task ...

You don't need to use read.fwf if you just want to replace specific characters. Instead, scan in the file line by line as a vector of character strings. Then you can use substring<- to replace specific positions by line and column.
Here's a simple example:
mydat <- scan(text='1234567890\n2345678901\n3456789012', what='character')
mydat
# [1] "1234567890" "2345678901" "3456789012"
substring(mydat[2],5,5) <- 'X'
mydat
# [1] "1234567890" "2345X78901" "3456789012"
substring(mydat[3],1,1) <- 'Y'
mydat
# [1] "1234567890" "2345X78901" "Y456789012"
The result can be written back to file using writeLines:
> writeLines(mydat)
1234567890
2345X78901
Y456789012

Related

Outputting an R dataframe to a .txt file - Align positive and negative values

I am trying to output a dataframe in R to a .txt file. I want the .txt file to ultimately mirror the dataframe output, with columns and rows all aligned. I found this post on SO which mostly gave me the desired output with the following (now modified) code:
gene_names_only <- select(deseq2_hits_table_df, Gene, L2F)
colnames(gene_names_only) <- c()
capture.output(
print.data.frame(gene_names_only, row.names=F, col.names=F, print.gap=0, quote=F, right=F),
file="all_samples_comparison_gene_list.txt"
)
The resultant output, however, does not align negative and positive values. See:
I ultimately want both positive and negative values to be properly aligned with one another. This means that -0.00012 and 4.00046 would have the '-' character from the prior number aligned with the '4' of the next character. How could I accomplish this?
Two other questions:
The output file has a blank line at the beginning of the output. How can I change this?
The output file also seems to put far more spaces between the left column and the right column than I would want. Is there any way I can change this?
Maybe try a finer scale treatment of the printing using sprintf and a different format string for positive and negative numbers, e.g.:
> df = data.frame(x=c('PICALM','Luc','SEC22B'),y=c(-2.261085123,-2.235376098,2.227728912))
> sprintf('%15-s%.6f',df$x[1],df$y[1])
[1] "PICALM -2.261085"
> sprintf('%15-s%.6f',df$x[2],df$y[2])
[1] "Luc -2.235376"
> sprintf('%15-s%.7f',df$x[3],df$y[3])
[1] "SEC22B 2.2277289"
EDIT:
I don't think that write.table or similar functions accept custom format strings, so one option could be to create a data frame of formatted strings and the use write.table or writeLines to write to a file, e.g.
dfstr = data.frame(x=sprintf('%15-s', df$x),
y=sprintf(paste0('%.', 7-1*(df$y<0),'f'), df$y))
(The format string for y here is essentially what I previously proposed.) Next, write dfstr directly:
write.table(x=dfstr,file='filename.txt',
quote=F,row.names=F,col.names=F)

read a csv file with quotation marks and regex R

ne,class,regex,match,event,msg
BOU2-P-2,"tengigabitethernet","tengigabitethernet(?'connector'\d{1,2}\/\d{1,2})","4/2","lineproto-5-updown","%lineproto-5-updown: line protocol on interface tengigabitethernet4/2, changed state to down"
these are the first two lines, with the first one that will serve as columns names, all separated by commas and with the values in quotation marks except for the first one, and I think it is that that creates troubles.
I am interested in the columns class and msg, so this output will suffice:
class msg
tengigabitethernet %lineproto-5-updown: line protocol on interface tengigabitethernet4/2, changed state to down
but I can also import all the columns and unselect the ones I don't want later, it's no worries.
The data comes in a .csv file that was given to me.
If I open this file in excel the columns are all in one.
I work in France, but I don't know in which locale or encoding the file was created (btw I'm not French, so I am not really familiar with those).
I tried with
df <- read.csv("file.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
and the dataframe has the columns' names nicely separated but the values are all in the first one
then with
library(readr)
df <- read_delim('file.csv',
delim = ",",
quote = "",
escape_double = FALSE,
escape_backslash = TRUE)
but this way the regex column gets splitted in two columns so I lose the msg variable altogether.
With
library(data.table)
df <- fread("file.csv")
I get the msg variable present but empty, as the ne variable contains both ne and class, separated by a comma.
this is the best output for now, as I can manipulate it to get the desired one.
another option is to load the file as a character vector with readLines to fix it, but I am not an expert with regexs so I would be clueless.
the file is also 300k lines, so it would be hard to inspect it.
both read.delim and fread gives warning messages, I can include them if they might be useful.
update:
using
library(data.table)
df <- fread("file.csv", quote = "")
gives me a more easily output to manipulate, it splits the regex and msg column in two but ne and class are distinct
I tried with the input you provided with read.csv and had no problems; when subsetting each column is accessible. As for your other options, you're getting the quote option wrong, it needs to be "\""; the double quote character needs to be escaped i.e.: df <- fread("file.csv", quote = "\"").
When using read.csv with your example I definitely get a data frame with 1 line and 6 columns:
df <- read.csv("file.csv")
nrow(df)
# Output result for number of rows
# > 1
ncol(df)
# Output result for number of columns
# > 6
tmp$ne
# > "BOU2-P-2"
tmp$class
# > "tengigabitethernet"
tmp$regex
# > "tengigabitethernet(?'connector'\\d{1,2}\\/\\d{1,2})"
tmp$match
# > "4/2"
tmp$event
# > "lineproto-5-updown"
tmp$msg
# > "%lineproto-5-updown: line protocol on interface tengigabitethernet4/2, changed state to down"

Extracting a single cell value from multiple csv files in R and

I have 500 csv. files with data that looks like:
sample data
I want to extract one cell (e.g. B4 or 0.477) per a csv file and combine those values into a single csv. What are some recommendations on how to do this easily?
You can try something like this
all.fi <- list.files("/path/to/csvfiles", pattern=".csv", full.names=TRUE) # store names of csv files in path as a string vector
library(readr) # package for read_lines and write_lines
ans <- sapply(all.fi, function(i) { eachline <- read_lines(i, n=4) # read only the 4th line of the file
ans <- unlist(strsplit(eachline, ","))[2] # split the string on commas, then extract the 2nd element of the resulting vector
return(ans) })
write_lines(ans, "/path/to/output.csv")
I can not add a comment. So, I will write my comment here.
Since your data is very large and it is very difficult to load it individually, then try this: Importing multiple .csv files into R. It is similar to the first part of your problem. For second part, try this:
You can save your data as a data.frame (as with the comment of #Bruno Zamengo) and then you can use select and merge functions in R. Then, you can easily combine them in single csv file. With select and merge functions you can select all the values you need and them combine them. I used this idea in my project. Do not forget to use lapply.

Importing csv file into R - numeric values read as characters

I am aware that there are similar questions on this site, however, none of them seem to answer my question sufficiently.
This is what I have done so far:
I have a csv file which I open in excel. I manipulate the columns algebraically to obtain a new column "A". I import the file into R using read.csv() and the entries in column A are stored as factors - I want them to be stored as numeric. I find this question on the topic:
Imported a csv-dataset to R but the values becomes factors
Following the advice, I include stringsAsFactors = FALSE as an argument in read.csv(), however, as Hong Ooi suggested in the page linked above, this doesn't cause the entries in column A to be stored as numeric values.
A possible solution is to use the advice given in the following page:
How to convert a factor to an integer\numeric without a loss of information?
however, I would like a cleaner solution i.e. a way to import the file so that the entries of column entries are stored as numeric values.
Cheers for any help!
Whatever algebra you are doing in Excel to create the new column could probably be done more effectively in R.
Please try the following: Read the raw file (before any excel manipulation) into R using read.csv(... stringsAsFactors=FALSE). [If that does not work, please take a look at ?read.table (which read.csv wraps), however there may be some other underlying issue].
For example:
delim = "," # or is it "\t" ?
dec = "." # or is it "," ?
myDataFrame <- read.csv("path/to/file.csv", header=TRUE, sep=delim, dec=dec, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
Then, let's say your numeric columns is column 4
myDataFrame[, 4] <- as.numeric(myDataFrame[, 4]) # you can also refer to the column by "itsName"
Lastly, if you need any help with accomplishing in R the same tasks that you've done in Excel, there are plenty of folks here who would be happy to help you out
In read.table (and its relatives) it is the na.strings argument which specifies which strings are to be interpreted as missing values NA. The default value is na.strings = "NA"
If missing values in an otherwise numeric variable column are coded as something else than "NA", e.g. "." or "N/A", these rows will be interpreted as character, and then the whole column is converted to character.
Thus, if your missing values are some else than "NA", you need to specify them in na.strings.
If you're dealing with large datasets (i.e. datasets with a high number of columns), the solution noted above can be manually cumbersome, and requires you to know which columns are numeric a priori.
Try this instead.
char_data <- read.csv(input_filename, stringsAsFactors = F)
num_data <- data.frame(data.matrix(char_data))
numeric_columns <- sapply(num_data,function(x){mean(as.numeric(is.na(x)))<0.5})
final_data <- data.frame(num_data[,numeric_columns], char_data[,!numeric_columns])
The code does the following:
Imports your data as character columns.
Creates an instance of your data as numeric columns.
Identifies which columns from your data are numeric (assuming columns with less than 50% NAs upon converting your data to numeric are indeed numeric).
Merging the numeric and character columns into a final dataset.
This essentially automates the import of your .csv file by preserving the data types of the original columns (as character and numeric).
Including this in the read.csv command worked for me: strip.white = TRUE
(I found this solution here.)
version for data.table based on code from dmanuge :
convNumValues<-function(ds){
ds<-data.table(ds)
dsnum<-data.table(data.matrix(ds))
num_cols <- sapply(dsnum,function(x){mean(as.numeric(is.na(x)))<0.5})
nds <- data.table( dsnum[, .SD, .SDcols=attributes(num_cols)$names[which(num_cols)]]
,ds[, .SD, .SDcols=attributes(num_cols)$names[which(!num_cols)]] )
return(nds)
}
I had a similar problem. Based on Joshua's premise that excel was the problem I looked at it and found that the numbers were formatted with commas between every third digit. Reformatting without commas fixed the problem.
So, I had the similar situation here in my data file when I readin as a csv. All the numeric value were turned into char. But in my file there was a value with a word "Filtered" instead of NA. I converted "Filtered" to NA in vim editor of linux terminal with a command <%s/Filtered/NA/g> and saved this file and later used it and read it in R, all the values were num type and not char type any more.
Looks like character value "Filtered" was inducing all values to be char format.
Charu
Hello #Shawn Hemelstrand here are the steps in detail below:
example matrix file.csv having 'Filtered' word in it
I opened the file.csv in linux command terminal
vi file.csv
then press "Esc shift:"
and type the following command at the bottom
"%s/Filtered/NA/g"
press enter
then press "Esc shift:"
write "wq" at the bottom (this save the file and quit vim editor)
then in R script I read the file
data<- read.csv("file.csv", sep = ',', header = TRUE)
str(data)
All columns were num type which were earlier char type.
In case you need more help, it would be easier to share your txt or csv file.

R: Import CSV with column names that contain spaces

CSV file looks like this (modified for brevity). Several columns have spaces in their title and R can't seem to distinguish them.
Alias;Type;SerialNo;DateTime;Main status; [...]
E1;E-70;781733;01/04/2010 11:28;8; [...]
Here is the code I am trying to execute:
s_data <- read.csv2( file=f_name )
attach(s_data)
s_df = data.frame(
scada_id=ID,
plant=PlantNo,
date=DateTime,
main_code=Main status,
seco_code=Additional Status,
main_text=MainStatustext,
seco_test=AddStatustext,
duration=Duration)
detach(s_data)
I have also tried substituting
main_code=Main\ status
and
main_code="Main status"
Unless you specify check.names=FALSE, R will convert column names that are not valid variable names (e.g. contain spaces or special characters or start with numbers) into valid variable names, e.g. by replacing spaces with dots. Try names(s_data). If you do use check.names=TRUE, then use single back-quotes (`) to surround the names.
I would also recommend using rename from the reshape package (or, these days, dplyr::rename).
s_data <- read.csv2( file=f_name )
library(reshape)
s_df <- rename(s_data,ID="scada_id",
PlantNo="plant",DateTime="date",Main.status="main_code",
Additional.status="seco_code",MainStatustext="main_text",
AddStatustext="seco_test",Duration="duration")
For what it's worth, the tidyverse tools (i.e. readr::read_csv) have the opposite default; they don't transform the column names to make them legal R symbols unless you explicitly request it.
s_data <- read.csv( file=f_name , check.names=FALSE)
I believe spaces get replaced by dots "." when importing CSV files. So you'd write e.g. Main.status. You can check by entering names(s_data) to see what the names are.

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