Having issues loading my data file into R

Question

I am not able to load my data file into R. I have tried every possible function I could find, including so many different variations of read.table and scan.

The file is a .txt file, and contains a block of data. It has no headers, etc. It is simply a set of results contained in a rectangle, with only spaces separating the different results.

When I input the data as if it were a table, and try finding the summary of the data, each row is taken as its own data set. So I end up with 9 different summaries.

I need the data to be recognised as if it were a list of numbers just separated by a comma, but regardless of what I do, I can't seem to do this.

Also, I have a mac (if that effects anything at all).

Any help would be MUCH appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

Here is another approach. I created text.txt in Word, the data looking like df below but without row numbers or column names. I read it into R with read.table.

df <- read.table("~/R/text.txt", sep = "")
df

  V1 V2 V3 V4
1  1  3  5  7
2  2  4  6  8
3  1  2  3  4
4  5  6  7  8

library("tidyr") # to do what the `melt` function of reshape2 does
df2 <- gather(df)[-1] # arrange all the values in one variable [remove one column]

   value
1      1
2      2
3      1
4      5
5      3
6      4
7      2
8      6
9      5
10     6
11     3
12     7
13     7
14     8
15     4
16     8
summary(df2$value) # calculate the summary statistics

   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
   1.00    2.75    4.50    4.50    6.25    8.00 

Answer 2

If I correctly understand your question, then you want to read the following (which is in a file, say ~/tmp/spaced-data.dsv):

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

as a single vector: c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).

If your file is not very large, then you can do the following:

> read.csv( text=paste0(readLines('~/tmp/spaced-data.dsv'), collapse=' '), 
            header=F, 
            sep=' '
          )
  V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8 V9
1  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9