If you are willing to use an outside utility, tr, and you are using UNIX then you can pipe the input through it so read.csv sees all the dashes as commas:
> cat("A,B-C,D + 1,2-3,4 + 5,6-7,8 + ", file = "dashcomma.dat") > > read.csv(pipe("tr - , < dashcomma.dat")) A B C D 1 1 2 3 4 2 5 6 7 8 On Windows tr is available from Duncan Murdoch's Rtools distribution. (google to find it). On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 6:31 PM, ZeMajik <zema...@gmail.com> wrote: > I have a data set where one column consists of two numerical factors, > separated by a "-". > So my data looks something like this: > > 43-156 > 43-43 > 1267-18 > . > . > . > > There are additional columns consisting of single factors as well, so > reading the csv file (where the data is stored) with the sep="-" addition > won't work since the rest of the factors are separated by commas. > So first of all, is there any way to import a file which is separated by "," > OR "-"? > > If this is not possible, does anyone have any ideas how I could go about to > separate these? I could use a text editor to replace the - with , and > import, but I would prefer doing this inside of R so that making a script > could be used in the future. > > Just to clarify, I would like the above to turn out as two separate columns > (or vectors) where the first in this would be (43,43,1267,....) and the > second (156,43,18,.....) > The dataset is rather large, with a few hundred thousand lines, so it would > be preferable to keep resource intensive methods to a minimum if possible. > > Thanks in advance! > Mike > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@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. > ______________________________________________ R-help@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.