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rreadr

How to read a fixed width file knowing column names but not the widths?

I recently encountered a problem where we had a fixed width file. For example - 

Name   Income
John   $10,000
Mary   $15,000
Walter $25,000

How to read the fixed width files using just the column names?

Solution

  • In order to solve this problem I came across a readr function read_fwf() which takes file name as an argument and another argument fwf_empty() specifying the whether the fix width be guess or not.

    Say, my file name is fixed_width_file.csv, and I have a million rows. I would read the file just by using the column names.

    library(readr)
read_fwf("fixed_width_file.csv",
         fwf_empty("fixed_width_file.csv", 
         col_names = c("Name", "Income")),
         skip = 1)

    Check to see that the columns are aligned by looking at head of the data.frame.

    I will update the answer as I know more.