Recreating nested frequency tables fast

Question

I find myself recreating nested frequency tables over and over again from articles using matrix and recreating tables (or sometimes giving up and using rep and making the full data set which is very time consuming. I'm looking for the fastest way (least code) to recreate this nested frequency table in R (I assume this is a question that many can benefit from).

              gender female male
hs.grad race                    
no      asian             3    4
        black             5   10
        white            17   11
yes     asian             5    7
        black             1    9
        white            11   17

This was created using ftable if that's helpful.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Do you mean something like this?

file = tempfile()
cat (text='              gender female male
hs.grad race                    
no      asian             3    4
        black             5   10
        white            17   11
yes     asian             5    7
        black             1    9
        white            11   17
', file=file)
ft = read.ftable(file)

Or

> read.ftable(textConnection("              gender female male
+ hs.grad race                    
+ no      asian             3    4
+         black             5   10
+         white            17   11
+ yes     asian             5    7
+         black             1    9
+         white            11   17"))