Use readLines and then just use the odd numbered lines: x.in <- readLines(yourFile) x.in <- x.in[seq(1, length(x.in), 2)] # every 2nd line
or just to make sure, only delete blank lines: x.in <- x.in[!(x.in == "")] On 4/30/07, Roland Rau <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Dear all, > > I have an ASCII file where records are separated by a blank. I would like to > read those data; however, only the data in rows 1, 3, 5, 7, ... are > important; the other lines (2,4,6,8,....) contain no useful information for > me. > So far I used awk/gawk to do it: > gawk '{if ((FNR % 2) != 0) {print $0}}' infile.txt > outfile.txt > > What is the recommended way to accomplish this in R? > Simply reading the whole file, and deleting all the even-numbered lines is > not straightforward since these lines have different length (whereas lines > 1,3,5,7,... have the same length). > > I 'RSiteSearched' for "read every second line from a file" but this search > did not yield the desired result. > Also trying out the arguments nrows and skip from read.table() did not > help. > > Maybe someone knows an easy way to do it from within R? -- of course not > using system("gawk ....") :-) > If not, it does not matter too much since I get the job done easily with > awk. > > Thanks, > Roland > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch 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. > -- Jim Holtman Cincinnati, OH +1 513 646 9390 What is the problem you are trying to solve? ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch 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.