From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Fri Oct 21 09:36:34 2005
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk)
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 09:36:34 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: [Rd] read.fwf doesn't work with header = TRUE (PR#8226)
Message-ID: <20051021073634.300C88661@slim.kubism.ku.dk>

On Thu, 20 Oct 2005 Emmanuel.Paradis at mpl.ird.fr wrote:

> Full_Name: Emmanuel Paradis
> Version: 2.1.1
> OS: Linux
> Submission from: (NULL) (193.49.41.105)
>
>
> read.fwf(..., header = TRUE) does not work properly since:
>
> 1/ the original header is printed on the console and not in FILE;
> 2/ the different 'parts' of the header should be separated with tabs
>   to work with the call to read.table.
>
> Here is a suggested fix for src/library/utils/R/read.fwf.R:
>
> 38c38,40
> <         cat(FILE, headerline, "\n")
> ---
>>         headerline <- unlist(strsplit(headerline, " {1,}"))
>>         headerline <- paste(headerline, collapse = "\t")
>>         cat(file = FILE, headerline, "\n")

Thanks, but I don't think that is right.  It assumes the header line is 
space-delimited (or at least that spaces get converted to tabs).  We have 
not specified the format of the header line, and it cannot usefully be 
fixed format.  So I think we need to specify it is delimited by 'sep'
(not tab).


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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[Rd] read.fwf doesn't work with header = TRUE (PR#8226)
ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk