CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
Joseph
Joseph

Reputation: 113

r error on replacing a character on a string

I'm reading a file that has a structure like this:

[1111111]aaaa;bbbb;cccc
[2222222]dddd;ffff;gggg

And i want to have a data frame like this:

Column A  Column B  Column C  Column D
1111111    aaaa       bbbb      cccc
2222222    dddd       ffff      gggg

So i need to split by ; and replace all the [ ]

So here is my code :

Read file

df<-read.csv("file.csv",sep=";")

Replace the [ ]

df_V1 <- gsub(pattern="[",replacement="",df$V1)  #ERROR HERE!
df_V1 <- gsub(pattern="]",replacement=";",df$V1) #Replace the ] to ;

Then merge all together

df_V1 <- do.call(rbind.data.frame,strsplit(df_V1,split=";"))
Data<- cbind(
                df_V1,
                df[,c(2:ncol(df))])

And here is my output

View(Data)

 Column A  Column B  Column C  Column D
 [1111111    aaaa       bbbb      cccc
 [2222222    dddd       ffff      gggg

And dont know why the first [ cant be replaced, i already tried use gsub and delete the first character of the string, but nothing seems to solve it. Any idea?

Thanks for your time

Upvotes: 3

Views: 55

Answers (2)

Andrew Lavers
Andrew Lavers

Reputation: 4378

If the columns truly are fixed in length, then read_fwf in library readr is useful.

library(readr)
read_fwf(
"[1111111]aaaa;bbbb;cccc
[2222222]dddd;ffff;gggg
", fwf_cols("Column A"=c(2,8), "Column B"=c(10,13), "Column C"=c(15,18), "column D"=c(20,23)))

#    `Column A` `Column B` `column C` `Column D`
#        <int>      <chr>      <chr>      <chr>
# 1    1111111       aaaa       bbbb       cccc
# 2    2222222       dddd       ffff       gggg

Upvotes: 1

akrun
akrun

Reputation: 887118

We can read the data using readLines first, do the string changes with gsub and then read with read.csv

read.csv(text=sub(";", "", gsub("[][]", ";", lines)), 
   sep=";", header=FALSE, col.names = paste0("Column", LETTERS[1:4]), stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
#  ColumnA ColumnB ColumnC ColumnD
#1 1111111    aaaa    bbbb    cccc
#2 2222222    dddd    ffff    gggg

data

lines <- readLines("file1.txt")

Upvotes: 3

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