Import Text File as Single Character String

Import text file as single character string

Here's a variant of the solution from @JoshuaUlrich that uses the correct size instead of a hard-coded size:

fileName <- 'foo.txt'
readChar(fileName, file.info(fileName)$size)

Note that readChar allocates space for the number of bytes you specify, so readChar(fileName, .Machine$integer.max) does not work well...

how to import a text file into R as a character vector

Try strsplit after removing the space with gsub

A <- strsplit(gsub('\\s+', '', lines),'')[[1]]
A
#[1] "H" "e" "l" "l" "o" "m" "y" "n" "a" "m" "e" "i" "s" "F" "a" "g" "u" "i" "C"
#[20] "u" "r" "t" "a" "i" "n"

Or

library(stringi)
stri_extract_all_regex(lines, '\\w')[[1]]
#[1] "H" "e" "l" "l" "o" "m" "y" "n" "a" "m" "e" "i" "s" "F" "a" "g" "u" "i" "C"
#[20] "u" "r" "t" "a" "i" "n"

Or if you are using linux, scan and be piped with awk

scan(pipe("awk 'BEGIN{FS=\"\";OFS=\" \"}{$1=$1}1' file.txt"), 
                  what='', quiet=TRUE)
#[1] "H" "e" "l" "l" "o" "m" "y" "n" "a" "m" "e" "i" "s" "F" "a" "g" "u" "i" "C"
#[20] "u" "r" "t" "a" "i" "n"

data

lines <- readLines('file.txt')

Trouble turning a text file with a character string into a column with one character per row in R

You can use strsplit. Just be aware that strsplit returns a list and hence you have to convert it into a character vector

string <- "jasdklnjabfial"
data.table::data.table(x = unlist(strsplit(string, "")))
#>     x
#>  1: j
#>  2: a
#>  3: s
#>  4: d
#>  5: k
#>  6: l
#>  7: n
#>  8: j
#>  9: a
#> 10: b
#> 11: f
#> 12: i
#> 13: a
#> 14: l

Read text file in R and convert it to a character object

By default character columns are converted to factors. You can avoid this by setting as.is=TRUE argument:

clusters <- read.delim("test", sep="\t", fill=TRUE, header=FALSE, as.is=TRUE)

If you only pass arguments from text file to character vector you could do something like:

x <- readLines("test")
xx <- strsplit(x,split="\t")
xx[[1]] # xx is a list
# [1] "248585_at"      "250887_at"      "245638_s_at"    "AFFX-BioC-5_at"

Importing a single vector from a text file as a variable in R

if your text file has R syntax in it (c(...)) then

x <- source("myfile.txt")[["value"]] 

should work.

How to read a text file into a string variable and strip newlines?

You could use:

with open('data.txt', 'r') as file:
    data = file.read().replace('\n', '')

Or if the file content is guaranteed to be one-line

with open('data.txt', 'r') as file:
    data = file.read().rstrip()

---

Related Topics