On Oct 13, 2010, at 1:13 PM, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:
Hello all,
I had a very strange looking problem that turned out to be due to
unexpected (by me at least) format changes to one of my data files.
We have a small lab study in which each run is represented by a row
in a tab-delimited file; each row identifies a repetition of the
experiment and associates it with some subjective measurements and
times from our notes that get used to index another file with lots
of automatically collected data. In short, nothing shocking.
In a moment of weakness, I opened the file using (I think it's
version 3.2) of OpenOffice Calc to edit something that I had mangled
when I first entered it, saved it (apparently the mistake), and
reran my analysis code. The results were goofy, and the problem was
in my code that runs before R ever sees the data. That code was
confused by things that I would like to ensure don't happen again,
and I suspect that some of you might have thoughts on it.
The problems specifically:
(1) OO seems to be a little stingy about producing tab-delimited
text; there is stuff online about using the csv and editing the
filter and folks (presumably like us) saying that it deserves to be
a separate option.
You have been little stingy yourself about describing what you did. I
see no specifics about the actual data used as input nor the specific
operations. I just opened an OO.o Calc workbook and dropped a
character vector, "1969-12-31 23:59:50" copied from help(POSIXct) into
a2. I then copied it to a3 and formatted it to be in the precanned
format, MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS , noticed that it had not been interpreted
as a data-time vlaue at all so entered =TODAY()+TIME(13;0;0) in a4 and
=TIME(13;0;0) in a5, formated to a user specified custom time format
of YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
Copied a5 to c1:c5
saved to a text-csv file specifying the field separator as tab and
the text-delimiter as '"' and got:
""time" 1899-12-30 13:00:00
"1969-12-31 23:59:50" 1899-12-30 13:00:00
"1969-12-31 23:59:50" 1899-12-30 13:00:00
2010-10-13 13:00:00 1899-12-30 13:00:00
1899-12-30 13:00:00 1899-12-30 13:00:00
This handling of dates and times does not seem particularly difficult
to elicit andseems to represent dates in YYYY and times in "military
time".
(2) Dates that I had formatted as YYYY got chopped to YY (did we not
learn anything last time?<g>) and times that I had formatted in 24
hours ended up AM/PM.
Have any of you found a nice (or at least predictable) way to use OO
Calc to edit files like this?
I didn't do anything I thought was out of the ordinary and so cannot
reproduce your problem. (This was on a Mac, but OO.o is probably going
to behave the same across *NIX cultures.)
--
David
If it insists on thinking for me, I wish it would think in 24 hour
time and 4 digit years :)
Is it possible that you have not done enough thinking for _it_?
I work on Linux, so Excel is off the table, but another spreadsheet
or text editor would be a viable option, as would configuration
changes to Calc.
Bill
______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT
______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
