readDataMisc: Read data from text files

Description

Reads data from text files that have a similar structure to OnTarget PC/TDS output files. Several files can be read with one call.

Usage

readDataMisc(fPath = getwd(), fNames, fPat, combine = FALSE)

Arguments

fPath

a character string containing the path to the folder with the data files, e.g. 'c:/folder/otFiles'.

fNames

a character vector containing the file names of the files that should be read in.

fPat

a character string containing the regular-expression that describes all names of files that should be read in. E.g., '^points[[:digit:]]{2}\\.txt$' for filenames 'points**.txt', where ** are 2 digits.

combine

a logical value indicating whether the data should be combined into one big data frame with combineData.

Value

With combine=FALSE: a list of data frames, each from one file that was read in. This list can then be combined into one big data frame by combineData.
file1data frame containing data from the first file
file2data frame containing data from the second file
...more data frames
With combine=TRUE: a combined data frame from combineData.

Details

If fNames is provided, fPat is ignored. If neither fNames nor fPat is provided, and we are in interactive mode under Windows, files can be chosen interactively. This function is basically a wrapper for read.table. The files need to be whitespace-delimited, have a header with the variable names. They need to contain at least the variable Group if combineData should be later used to combine them into one big data frame. In order to be later used by functions analyzeGroup or compareGroups, the following variables need to be present as well: Distance, Aim.X, Aim.Y, Point.X, Point.Y. Additional variable names must not contain spaces. There can only be exactly as many variable names as there are non-empty data-columns. For reading in files exported from OnTarget PC 1.10, see readDataOT1. For reading in files exported from OnTarget PC 2.10 or OnTarget TDS v3.71, see readDataOT2.

Examples

Run this code

fPath   <- 'c:/folder/otFiles'           # folder with data files
fileNam <- c('pts01.txt', 'pts02.txt')   # desired files in that folder
DFlist  <- readDataMisc(path, fNames=fileNam)

## alternatively specify filename pattern for all files to be read in
fPath  <- 'c:/folder/otFiles'            # folder with data files
fPat   <- '^pts[[:digit:]]{2}\\.txt$'  # filename pattern
DFlist <- readDataMisc(path, fPat=pattern)

## result should look like this
data(DFlistInch)

## overview over list
sapply(DFlistInch, dim)                  # number of obs and vars
str(DFlistInch)                          # variables in each data frame
lapply(DFlistInch, head)                 # first rows in each data frame

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