CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
MorrisseyJ
MorrisseyJ

Reputation: 1271

Get text file to useble dataframe R

I am trying to read a .txt file from the internet and get it into a useable form in R. Seems like it should be easy, but I am struggling:

Data is from Berkeley Earth:

b_earth_url <- 'http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/auto/Global/Land_and_Ocean_complete.txt'

I have tried the following: 

read.table(b_earth_url, sep = '\t', comment.char = '%', row.names = NULL)

or:

b_earth_data <- readLines(b_earth_url)[!grepl('%', readLines(b_earth_url))] 
data.frame(b_earth_data, stringsAsFactors = F)

I have tried a few other options, but can't get past a dataframe with a single variable, containing a fixed width chr vector.

I have tried extract(), separate() and strsplit(), and can't get any of them to work. I don't think I know how to use a fixed width separator for sep =

Upvotes: 1

Views: 41

Answers (1)

dcarlson
dcarlson

Reputation: 11076

The separator is whitespace (blanks) not tabs:

out <- read.table(b_earth_url, comment.char = '%')
head(out)
#     V1 V2     V3    V4     V5    V6  V7  V8  V9 V10 V11 V12
# 1 1850  1 -0.781 0.382    NaN   NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
# 2 1850  2 -0.260 0.432    NaN   NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
# 3 1850  3 -0.399 0.348    NaN   NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
# 4 1850  4 -0.696 0.296    NaN   NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
# 5 1850  5 -0.690 0.320    NaN   NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN
# 6 1850  6 -0.392 0.228 -0.529 0.147 NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN

Upvotes: 3

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