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 = "\t", as.is = FALSE,
         skip = 0, row.names, col.names, n = -1, ...)

Arguments

file	the name of the file which the data are to be read from. Alternatively, file can be a connection, which will be opened if necessary, and if so closed at the end of the function call.
widths	integer vector, giving the widths of the fixed-width fields (of one line).
sep	character; the separator used internally; should be a character that does not occur in the file.
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.
n	the maximum number of records (lines) to be read, defaulting to no limit.
...	further arguments to be passed to read.table.

Details

Fields that are of zero-width or are wholly beyond the end of the line in file are replaced by NA.

Value

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

Author(s)

Brian Ripley for R version: original Perl by Kurt Hornik.

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)
cat(file=ff, "123", "987654", sep="\n")
read.fwf(ff, width=c(1,0, 2,3))    #> 1 NA 23 NA \ 9 NA 87 654
unlink(ff)

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