[R] scanning data into r

[David Winsemius]

On Mar 28, 2012, at 2:23 PM, joel.green wrote:

> Hey
>
> I am having trouble importing data into R, my data field looks like  
> this
>
> 21  TEST DATA
> 32  year:2012
> 33
> 34
> 5
> 36
>

 > read.table(text="21  TEST DATA
+ 32  year:2012
+ 33
+ 34
+ 5
+ 36", fill=TRUE)[1]

   V1
1 21
2 32
3 33
4 34
5  5
6 36

> I require the the number at the start of each line however the text  
> is not
> needed, i am struggling to get R to import the data with out  
> changing the
> file itself?

Use , fill =TRUE)  and then throw away everything except the first  
column. Could also use readLines and split on " " and take first  
element with sapply( ...,  "[" , 1)
>
> how do i import the data, i have tried using comment.char=" ",  
> however this
> didnt work, any help would be much appreciated thanks
>
>
-- 

David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT