CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rdelimiterlogfile
reimery
reimery

Reputation: 1

How can I read a semi-colon delimited log file in R?

I am currently working with a raw data set that, when downloaded from our device, outputs in a log file with values delimited with a semi-colon.

I am simply trying to load this data into r so I can put it onto a dataframe and analyze from there. However, as it is a log file I can't use read_csv or read_delim. When I use read_log, there is no input where I can define the delimiter, and as such my columns are being misread and I am receiving error messages since r is not recognizing ; as a delimiter in the file.

I have been unable to find any other instances of people using delimited log files with r, but I am trying to make the code work before I resign to uploading it into excel (I don't want to do this, both because the files have a lot of associated data and my computer runs excel very slowly). Does anyone have any suggestions of functions I could use to load the semi-colon delimited log file?

Thank you!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 324

Answers (1)

Marco_CH
Marco_CH

Reputation: 3294

You could use data.table::fread(). freadautomatically recognizes most delimiters very reliable and reads most file types like *.csv, *.txt etc. If your facing a situation where it doesn't guess the right delimiter, you can define it by setting the optionfread(your_file, sep=";"). But it won't be necessary in your case.

I've creates a file named your_file without any extension and the following content:

Text1;Text2;Text3;Text4

And now imported it to R:

library(data.table)

df = fread("your_file", header=FALSE)

Output:

> df
      V1    V2    V3    V4
1: Text1 Text2 Text3 Text4

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions