converting multiple lines of text into a data frame

Question

I'm trying to find a way to convert multiple lines of text into a data frame. I'm not sure if there's a way where you can use read.delim() to read in multiple lines of text and create the following data frame with something akin to rehape()?.

The data is structured as follows:

A: 1
B: 2
C: 10
A: 34
B: 20
C: 6.7
A: 2
B: 78
C: 35

I'd like to convert this data to something that looks like the following data frame:

A             B             C
1             2             10
34            20            6.7
2             78            35

Apologies if there is an obvious way to do this!

Answer 1

How about :

s<-"A: 1
B: 2
C: 10
A: 34
B: 20
C: 6.7
A: 2
B: 78
C: 35
"
d<-read.delim(textConnection(s),header=FALSE,sep=":",strip.white=TRUE)
cols<-levels(d[,'V1'])
d<-data.frame(sapply(cols,function(x) {d['V2'][d['V1']==x]}, USE.NAMES=TRUE))

which yields:

   A  B    C
1  1  2 10.0
2 34 20  6.7
3  2 78 35.0

Answer 2

Here is how to do it with the plyr package:

require("plyr")
my.data <- "A: 1
            B: 2
            C: 10
            A: 34
            B: 20
            C: 6.7
            A: 2
            B: 78
            C: 35"   
df <- read.delim(textConnection(my.data),header=FALSE,sep=":",strip.white=TRUE)

as.data.frame(dlply(df,.(V1),function(x) x[[2]]))

You get

   A  B    C
1  1  2 10.0
2 34 20  6.7
3  2 78 35.0

You can see what magic plyr is doing just by playing with dlply(df,.(V1)) or dlply(df,.(V1),function(x) x)