Dear R-ers! I have a badly organized data base in Excel. Once I read it into R it looks like this (all variables become factors because of many spaces and other characters in Excel):
x<-data.frame(A=c("","Name1","text1","text2","text3","","","","Name2","text1","text2","text3","","","Name3","text1","text2","text3","","Name1","text1","text2","text3",""), B=c("","",1,2,3,"","","","",4,5,6,"","","",7,8,9,"","",3,3,3,""),C=c("","",1,1,2,"","","","",5,6,5,"","","",9,8,7,"","",2,2,2,""), D=c("","",3,2,1,"","","","",6,5,4,"","","",7,7,8,"","",1,1,1,"")) x I was wondering if it's at all possible to grab the data blocks from this file and put them into a list, e.g., so that the first element of the list is the data frame: Name1 1 1 3 Name12 1 2 Name13 2 1 second element of the list is the data frame Name2 4 5 6 Name2 5 6 5 Name2 6 5 4 etc. Notice that all blocks have the same number of rows. I have several challenges: 1. I cannot use the row number because the number of irrelevant lines between blocks is always different. 2. I'd love to replace all the "text1", "text2", "text3" strings (which are always the same within each block) with the name that is one cell above it. 3. All variables are now factors - I am afraid if I recode them later as "as numeric" - they numbers will change their values. Thank you very much for your suggestions! -- Dimitri Liakhovitski Ninah.com dimitri.liakhovit...@ninah.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.