[R] A read.table mystery (data for Framemaker Mac)

[Mark Wardle]

1. Which version of Filemaker? NB: Framemaker is a different program
(desktop publishing), so do be a little precise!
2. If it is an ancient version, then I suggest exporting a block of
columns at a time, and then using merge() in R to join it all back up
3. I store all my clinical data in Filemaker 8.5 on the Mac. It is
great. There have been no significant data export or import issues.
One problem (with this version - may be fixed in 9.0) is that
Filemaker ODBC drivers are pretty dreadful and so I do not use ODBC to
access the data held in a Filemaker database. However, Filemaker's
client ODBC access works fine, and, in conjunction with some
commercial ODBC drivers for PostgreSQL, export my data into
postgresql, and then from there import data into R. It is fast and
works very well, albeit in a rather convoluted fashion!

Best wishes,

Mark



On 12/10/2007, Emmanuel Charpentier <charpent at bacbuc.dyndns.org> wrote:
> Gabor Grothendieck a écrit :
> > On 10/11/07, Emmanuel Charpentier <charpent at bacbuc.dyndns.org> wrote:
> >> I have to read some clinical data a file coming from Filemaker on
> >> Macintosh (Ugh ! But it could be worse and come from Excel...).
> >> Exporting via Excel is out of question since the file has 467 columns
> >> and 121 lines (+ headers), which is out of reach of Excel. So I received
> >> an "mer"" files, which is what Filemaker exports as a text file.
> >
> > The limits for Excel are 1 million rows and 16,000 columns (based on
> > Excel 2007 which is what I have).
>
> I don't. More important, the version of Framemaker used by my
> correspondent still uses old Excel limits (,o more than 256 columns).
>
> > Read the last line on every message to r-help,
>
> I do ...
>
>                                                 Emmanuel Charpentier
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
> This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System.
> For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email
> ______________________________________________________________________
>


-- 
Dr. Mark Wardle
Specialist registrar, Neurology
Cardiff, UK