readFile: Read Data File

Description

Reads an table formatted ASCII file and creates a data frame from it.
Usage

readFile(file, fields = TRUE, units = TRUE, sep = "", 
encoding = getOption("encoding"))

file{character; the name of the file which data will be read from.  Alternatively, file can be a readable text-mode connection (optional).}
fields{logical; if TRUE the file contains the names of the variables as its first line.}
units{logical; if TRUE the file contains the units of the variables as its second line.}
sep{character; the field separator string. Values on each line of the file are separated by this string.}
encoding{character; encoding to be assumed for input strings. If the value is "latin1" or "UTF-8" it is used to mark character strings as known to be in Latin-1 or UTF-8: it is not used to re-encode the input.}

A tab delineated text file containing at least the following variables:
  [object Object],[object Object]
The first [1,] and second [2,] rows are reserved for column descriptors and units, respectively. 
Units associated with date-time values are based on format character strings described in strptime, 
for example "02/26/2010 02:05:39 PM" is represented using "%d/%m/%Y %I:%M:%S %p".
You may embed comments in the data file by using the #}} 
character string; anything after a #}} on a line will be ignored. 
The NA character string is interpreted as a NA value. 

For example, a data file containing a header and three rows of data might look like:
lrrrrl{
# Ignored character string \tab \tab \tab \tab \tab \cr
Date Time 	X 	Y  	Z 	Concentration 	# Column names\cr
%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%OS 	m 	m 	m 	mg/L 	# Column units\cr
2008-02-03 10:43:38.275 	7.83 	-2.3 	0.2650 	6.211E-6 	
2008-04-24 11:20:43.757 	15.01 	8.1 	NA 	3.135E-5 	# Comment\cr
2009-04-25 13:02:11.123 	-4.73 	23.7 	0.3790 	1.729E-6 	}

Returns a list with the following components: 
dat{data.frame; a table of data}
cols{character; a vector of column names}
vars{character; a vector giving an initial guess for column names associated with the date-time, x, y, and z variables.}

[object Object],[object Object]

read.table

f <- system.file("RSurvey-ex/DataExample.dat", package = "RSurvey")
con <- file(f, open = "r", encoding = "latin1")
d <- readFile(con)
close(con)

file
Description

Usage

Arguments
