How to read a text file into GNU R with a multiple-byte separator?

Question

I can use read.csv or read.csv2 to read data into R. But the issue I encountered is that my separator is a multiple-byte string instead of a single character. How can I deal

Answer 1

In this case you can replace textConnection(txt) with your file name, but essentially you can build a code or function around strsplit. Here I'm assuming you have a header line, but you can of course give define a header argument and generalize the creation of your data frame based on the function below:

read.multisep <- function(File,sep) {
    Lines <- readLines(File)
    Matrix <- do.call(rbind,strsplit(Lines, sep, fixed = TRUE))
    DataFrame <- structure(data.frame(Matrix[-1,]), names=Matrix[1,]) ## assuming header is present
    DataFrame[] <- lapply(DataFrame, type.convert)                    ## automatically convert modes
    DataFrame
}

example <- "a#*&b#*&c
            1#*&2#*&3
            4#*&5#*&6"

read.multisep(textConnection(example),sep="#*&")

  a b c
1 1 2 3
2 4 5 6