R read text file as string

The first few rows of the data look as follows:. Width,Species" "1,5. In the previous Example, I have shown you how to read csv Excel files with the readLines function. Now you might ask: is it also possible to use readLines for xlsx Excel files?

Fortunately, there is an easy work-around in case you want to apply readLines to xlsx files — Just convert your xlsx file to csv! First, we need to install and load the xlsx R package :. Install and load xlsx package install.

Then, we can use the write. Write example xlsx to currently used directory write. Another quite common scenario is that you are interested of some lines within your text, i. Fortunately, the R package reader provides such options. Viewed 34k times. Done - thanks for letting me know.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Andrew 8, 8 8 gold badges 43 43 silver badges 57 57 bronze badges. Andrie Andrie k 41 41 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Caleb Fitzgerald Caleb Fitzgerald 1 1 silver badge 4 4 bronze badges. If the file exists then another thing to try is: example. Quotes discusses additional variations. EDIT: Added 4. Grothendieck G. Grothendieck k 16 16 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Note that normalizePath works even if the file doesn't exist, in which case a warning is issued.

Tyler Rinker Tyler Rinker k 60 60 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Thanks Tyler, maybe I should clarify that I am also interested in workarounds so this is very useful; I suspected that it was not possible to do by default.

No, this is not possible with R versions before 4. Michael Hoffman Michael Hoffman Although I fear on this occasion you are correct, I have learnt from bitter experience to never say that anything is impossible in R. Your email address will not be published. Post Comment. On this website, I provide statistics tutorials as well as code in Python and R programming.

This can be accomplished using the scan function from the command line. The scan function reads the fields of data in the file as specified by the what option, with the default being numeric. If the data are a mix of numeric, string or complex data, then a list can be used in the what option.

The default separator for the scan function is any white space single space, tab, or new line. Because the default is space delimiting, you can enter data on separate lines. When all the data have been entered, just hit the enter key twice which will terminate the scanning.

The scan function is an extremely flexible tool for importing data. Unlike the read. In the previous example we input first numeric data and then string data directly from the console; in the following example, we input a text file. For the what option, we use list and then list the variables, and after each variable, we tell R what type of variable e.

In the first example, the first variable is age , and we tell R that age is a numeric variable by setting it equal to 0. The second variable is called name , and it is denoted as a string variable by the empty quote marks. In the second example, we list NULL first, indicating that we do not want the first variable to be read. After using the scan function, we use the sapply function, which makes a list out of a vector of names in x.

The read.