Question

I am parsing a text file in R line by line.

Typically, a line looks like this:

2 1 3GFT B 19 ? 187 ? P01116 1 169 1 169 

So I parse it like so:

items<- unlist(strsplit(filedata[i]," +"))

However, for a very specific line, it looks like this:

1 3GFT HIS A 79 ? UNP P01116 GLN 61 'SEE REMARK 999' 61  19  

Notice that in the line above, the ‘See Remark 999’ should be 1 field yet using my parse, it will be 3. Can someone help me with the strsplit so that it parses correctly?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Maybe you can use scan :

scan(text="1 3GFT HIS A 79 ? UNP P01116 GLN 61 'SEE REMARK 999' 61  19", 
     quote="'", what="character")

Which gives :

 [1] "1"              "3GFT"           "HIS"            "A"             
 [5] "79"             "?"              "UNP"            "P01116"        
 [9] "GLN"            "61"             "SEE REMARK 999" "61"            
[13] "19"