Description
A GUI for reading table formatted data from a text file.Usage
ImportData(parent = NULL)
Arguments
parent
tkwin; the GUI parent window. Value
- Sets the following components in
Data
: - data.rawdata.frame; the imported (or raw) data table.
- colslist; length equal to the current number of data variables.
Each component in
cols
is linked to a specific variable,
see ManageVariables
. - commentcharacter; a vector of comment strings.
- importlist; saved GUI options.
- Components of
import
include: - sourcecharacter; the name of the file or package which the data is read
from.
- fmtslogical; indicates whether the file contains the conversion
specification format strings of the variables.
- colslogical; indicates whether the file contains the names of the
variables.
- skipinteger; the number of lines skiped before data is read.
- sepcharacter; the field separator string.
- deccharacter; used in the file for decimal points.
- nacharacter; string interpreted as
NA
values. - quotecharacter; the set of quoting characters.
- commentcharacter; comment character.
- encodingcharacter; encoding that was assumed for input strings, see
Encoding
. - str.as.factlogical; should character variables be converted to factors?
Details
This GUI is a wrapper for the read.table
function.
Data connections are defined as the path to the file to be opened, a
complete URL (e.g. http://, ftp:// or file://), or windows clipboard.
Files are limited to text format (e.g., .tsv .csv, or
.txt); however, they can be compressed by
http://www.bzip.org/{bzip2} with additional extension .bz2.
Conversion specification formats are the character representation of object
types used to: identify column classes prior to reading in data,
and format values for printing.
Conversion specifications are based on C-style string formatting
commands for numeric
, integer
, and character
object classes, see sprintf
; for example,
a format string of "%.5f" applied to the mathematical constant pi
results in "3.14159". Calendar date and time objects of class POSIXct
are
defined by the ISO C99 / POSIX standard, see strftime
;
for example, "02/26/2010 02:05:39 PM" is represented using
"%d/%m/%Y %I:%M:%S %p".
Comments located above data records and header lines are preserved; all other
comments are ignored. Requires the specification of a comment character.
Performance issues associated with reading in large files can be alleviated
by specifying formats in a header line, and giving the maximum number of
rows to read in.