How to read space delimited data into a data frame from your script/document file?

Question

I couldn't think of exactly what the question should have been so if you have a suggestion for what it should be please let me know.

I've seen before a way to read data into a data frame that is tabbed or white spaced in your working script file. For example:

dat <- SOMETHING(
person1    12    15
person2    15    18
person3    20    14
)

Say you're grabbing data from a website and just want to table a few things, and it comes off like this with white space etc. I could open a text file and save it and then read.table or similar with csv but I'm sure I've seen data read in this way and can't for the life of me remember how...

Thanks

Answer 1

The "trick" is a text connection as the "file" argument to read.table:

dat <- read.table(textConnection("person1    12    15
person2    15    18
person3    20    14"), stringsAsFactors=FALSE
)
str(dat)
'data.frame':   3 obs. of  3 variables:
 $ V1: chr  "person1" "person2" "person3"
 $ V2: int  12 15 20
 $ V3: int  15 18 14

The default 'sep' argument works for whitespace separation. If you need tabs to separate then use sep="\t" (after the closing-paren from the textConnection call).

Edit: This actually got incorporated into a subsequent revision of the underlying scan function which was given a 'text'-argument. The code could now simply be:

dat <- read.table(text="person1    12    15
    person2    15    18
    person3    20    14", stringsAsFactors=FALSE
    )

The readLines function still requires the use of textConnection to read from a 'character'-object, since it does not use scan.