Re: Scanning a line for a carriage return

["Andreas Krause" <akrause@Pharsight.com>]

Hi,

 

the easy way out is to get rid of the carriage returns.

Under most unix distributions, you would have a tool like dos2unix.

(Note: do you want the Ctrl-Ms to insert a new line or not? dos2unix adds new lines)

Under Windows, wordpad is generally better than notepad in handling CR characters (Ctrl-M).

You should be able to just open the file with wordpad, ctrl-a to select all, ctrl-c for copy, and paste into a new document.

Many editors can also do the job in that you can specify what type of file to save (DOS, Unix) or get rid of the characters (see emacs or vi).

Does this help?

Alternatively, see if importData instead of read.table does the job.

 

  Andreas Krause

 

-----
Andreas Krause, PhD
Pharsight Corporation
Strategic Consulting Services
http://www.pharsight.com/

Phone:  +41-61-481 39 74
Fax:            +41-61-481 39 78
Cell:   +41-76-324 75 54
 

 

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From: s-news-owner@lists.biostat.wustl.edu [mailto:s-news-owner@lists.biostat.wustl.edu] On Behalf Of Walter R. Paczkowski
Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2007 3:03 AM
To: s-news@lists.biostat.wustl.edu
Subject: [S] Scanning a line for a carriage return

Hi,

I'm hoping someone has a suggestion for handling a simple 
problem.  A client gave me a comma separated value file (call it x.csv) 
that has an id and name and address for about 25,000 people (25,000 
records).  I used read.table to read it, but then discovered that there are 
stray carriage returns on several records.  This plays havoc with 
read.table since it starts a new input line when it sees the carriage 
return.  In short, the read is all wrong.

I thought I could write a 
simple function to parse a line and write it back out, character by 
character.  If a carriage return is found, it would simply be ignored on 
the writing back out part.  But how do I identify a carriage return?  
What is the code or symbol?  Is there any easier way to rid the file of 
carriage returns in the middle of the input lines?

Any help is 
appreciated.

Walt Paczkowski

_________________________________

Walter R. Paczkowski, Ph.D.
Data Analytics Corp.
44 Hamilton Lane
Plainsboro, NJ  08536
(V) 609-936-8999
(F) 609-936-3733