Importing "csv" file with multiple-character separator to R?

Question

I have a "csv" text file where each field is separated by \t&%$# which I'm now trying to import into R.

The sep= argument of read.table()instists on a single character. Is there a quick way to directly import this file?

Some of the data fields are user-submitted text which contain tabs, quotes, and other messy stuff, so changing the delimiter to something simpler seems like it could create other problems.

Answer 1

The following code will be able to handle multiple separator chars:

#fileName <- file name with fully qualified path
#separators <- each of them separated by '|'

read <- function(fileName, separators) {
    data <- readLines(con <- file(fileName))
    close(con)
    records <- sapply(data, strsplit, split=separators)
    dataFrame <- data.frame(t(sapply(records,c)))
    rownames(dataFrame) <- 1: nrow(dataFrame)
    return(as.data.frame(dataFrame,stringsAsFactors = FALSE))
}

Answer 2

As explained in this post, it is not possible in R without resorting to string parsing. You can pre-parse your file in another language (Awk, Perl, Python etc.) or read it line-by-line and parse the resulting strings in R.