This help topic is for R version 0.90. For the current version of R, try https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/base/html/read.fwf.html
read.fwf {base}R Documentation

Read Fixed Width Format Files

Description

Read a “table” of fixed width formatted data into a data.frame.

Usage

read.fwf(file, widths, sep=" ", as.is = FALSE,
         skip = 0, row.names, col.names)

Arguments

file

the name of the file which the data are to be read from. Each row of the table appears as one line of the file.

widths

integer vector, giving the widths of the fixed-width fields (of one line).

sep

character; the separator used internally; should be irrelevant.

as.is

see read.table.

skip

number of initial lines to skip; see read.table.

row.names

see read.table.

col.names

see read.table.

Value

A data.frame as by read.table which is called internally.

Note

This function currently relies on the Perl script ‘\$R\_HOME/bin/fwf2table’. Therefore, it will only work in an environment with Perl 5 installed, see ‘INSTALL’ in the top-level directory of the sources.

Author(s)

Kurt Hornik hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at

See Also

scan and read.table.

Examples

ff <- tempfile()
cat(file=ff, "123456", "987654", sep="\n")
read.fwf(ff, width=c(1,2,3))	#> 1 23 456 \ 9 87 654
unlink(ff)

[Package base version 0.90 ]