How can I importsmessy text files in R

Does anybody have some advise on how to import a text file that looks like this:

"X1"II"X2"II"X3"II"X4"II"X5"""1"II4II"123-23"II01-03-2006II"209"II"1"II5II"124-23"II02-03-2006II"208"II....(etc.)?

into R and convert it into a dataframe? So i would like achieve something like this:

| X1 | X2 |X3 | X4 | X5 | | -- | -- | ------- | ---------- | --- | | 1 | 4 | 123-23 | 01-03-2006 | 209 | | 1 | 5 | 124-23 | 02-03-2006 | 208 |
.....

I managed to use read.file to import it as a long string but got stuck after that. I'm grateful for any help.

Solution

I copied your text into a text file,

"X1"II"X2"II"X3"II"X4"II"X5"""1"II4II"123-23"II01-03-2006II"209"II"1"II5II"124-23"II02-03-2006II"208"

It seems from inspection that

The header row is X1 X2 X3 X4 X5
Columns are separated by II.
newline indicator is that rectangle , which after reading in using readr::read_file becomes \v

based on that, you are looking for a data.frame with 5 columns. NOTE: some of the line endings come after II (like "209"II) which is odd given it suggests the end of row (I have had to add a fix to that in the code below).

Since functions like read.table require the sep variable to be 1 byte, you cannot use something like read.table(file = 'text.txt', sep = 'II'). So a current working solution is

library(magrittr)
library(stringr)
library(readr)

text <- readr::read_file(file = 'C:/Users/lcroote/my_data/read_test.txt')

text %>% 
  str_replace_all('\"', '') %>% # remove escaped quotes (readr thing)
  str_replace_all('II', ',') %>% # columns separated by II
  str_replace_all(',\v', '\n') %>% # some line endings have extra ,
  str_replace_all('\v', '\n') %>%  # replace \v by newline \n for read.table
  read.table(text = ., sep = ',', header = T, fill = T, row.names = NULL)
>
   X1 X2     X3         X4  X5
1  1  4 123-23 01-03-2006 209
2  1  5 124-23 02-03-2006 208