R: Recipes for Analysis, Visualization and Machine Learning

Reading data from fixed-width formatted files

In fixed-width formatted files, columns have fixed widths; if a data element does not use up the entire allotted column width, then the element is padded with spaces to make up the specified width. To read fixed-width text files, specify columns by column widths or by starting positions.

Getting ready

Download the files for this chapter and store the student-fwf.txt file in your R working directory.

How to do it...

Read the fixed-width formatted file as follows:

> student  <- read.fwf("student-fwf.txt", widths=c(4,15,20,15,4), col.names=c("id","name","email","major","year"))

How it works...

In the student-fwf.txt file, the first column occupies 4 character positions, the second 15, and so on. The c(4,15,20,15,4) ...