On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 10:32 PM, Mike Miller <mbmille...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, 3 May 2011, Andrew Robinson wrote: > >> try substr() > > OK. Apparently, it allows things like this... > >> substr("abcdef",2,4) > > [1] "bcd" > > ...which is like this: > > echo "abcdef" | cut -c2-4 > > But that doesn't use a delimiter, it only does character-based cutting, and > it is very limited. With "cut -c" I can do stuff this: > > echo "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" | cut -c-3,12-15,17- > > abclmnoqrstuvwxyz > > It extracts characters 1 to 3, 12 to 15 and 17 to the end. > > That was a great tip, though, because it led me to strsplit, which can do > what I want, however somewhat awkwardly: > >> y <- "a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z" >> paste(unlist(strsplit(y, delim))[c(1:3,12:15,17:26)], collapse=delim) > > [1] "a b c l m n o q r s t u v w x y z" > > That gives me what I want, but it is still a little awkward. I guess I > don't quite get what I'm doing with lists. I'm not clear on how this would > work with a vector of strings. >
Try this: > read.fwf(textConnection("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"), widths = c(3, 8, 4, 1, > 10), colClasses = c(NA, "NULL")) V1 V3 V5 1 abc lmno qrstuvwxyz -- Statistics & Software Consulting GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc. tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com ______________________________________________ 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.