On 09/28/2011 09:23 AM, Mehmet Suzen wrote:
This might be obvious but I was wondering if anyone knows quick and easy
way of writing out a CSV file with varying row lengths, ideally an
initial data read from a CSV file which has the same format. See example
below.
I found it quite strange that R cannot write it in one go, so one must
append blocks or post-process the file, is this true? (even Ruby can do
it!!)
Otherwise it puts ,"","" or similar for missing column values in the
shorter length rows and fill=FALSE option do not work!
I don't want to post-process if possible.
See this post:
http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Re-read-csv-trap-td3301924.html
Example that generated Error!
writeLines(c("A,B,C,D",
"1,a,b,c",
"2,f,g,c",
"3,a,i,j",
"4,a,b,c",
"5,d,e,f",
"6,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n"),
con=file("test.csv"))
read.csv("test.csv")
try(read.csv("test.csv",fill=FALSE))
Hi Mehmet,
The example doesn't need to call "file", writeLines does it for you. It
worked for me:
writeLines(c("A,B,C,D",
"1,a,b,c",
"2,f,g,c",
"3,a,i,j",
"4,a,b,c",
"5,d,e,f",
"6,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n"),
con="test.csv")
and to get the original object back, use:
readLines("test.csv")
The reason you can't use read.csv is that it returns a data frame, and
that object can't have elements of unequal length. If you want an object
with elements of unequal length, try:
as.list(readLines("test.csv"))
Jim
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