Hello R wizards, What is the best way to read a data file containing both fixed-width and tab-delimited files? (More detail follows.)
_*Details:*_ The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics provides local area unemployment statistics at ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/time.series/la/, and the data are documented in the file la.txt <ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/time.series/la/la.txt>. Each data file has five tab-delimited fields: * series_id * year * period (codes for things like quarter or month of year) * value * footnote_codes The series_id consists of five fixed-width subfields (length in parentheses): * survey abbreviation (2) * seasonal code (1) * area type code (2) * area code (6) * measure code (2) So an example record might be: LASPS36040003 1990 M01 8.8 L I want to read in the data in one pass and convert them to a data frame with the following columns (actual name, class in parentheses): Survey abbreviation (survey, character) Seasonal (seasonal, logical seasonal=T) Area type (area_type_code, factor) Area (area_code, factor) Measure (measure_code, factor) Year (year, Date) Period (period, factor) Value (value, numeric) Footnote (footnote_codes, character but see note) (Regarding the Footnote, I have to look at the data more. If there's just one code per record, this will be a factor; if there are multiple, it will either be character or a list. For not I'm making it only character.) Currently I can read the data just fine using read.table, but this makes series_id the first variable. I want to break out the subfields as separate columns. Any suggestions? Thanks. Marsh Feldman [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ 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.
