Importing one long line of data into R

Question

I have a large data file consisting of a single line of text. The format resembles

Cat    14  Dog    15  Horse  16

I\'d eventually like to get

Answer 1

Here's one solution using a variety of tools/hacks, specifically:

• strplit to split on space characters (\\s)
• unlist to coerce the list returned by strsplit into a vector
• matrix to turn the vector into the appropriate shape
• data.frame to allow for columns of different mode
• as.character and as.numeric to convert the Count column from a factor

Here's everything put together:

txt <- "Cat 14 Dog 15 Horse 16"

out <- data.frame(matrix(unlist(strsplit(txt, "\\s")), ncol = 2, byrow = TRUE, dimnames = list(NULL, c("Animal", "Count"))))
out$Count <- as.numeric(as.character(out$Count))
str(out)

'data.frame':   3 obs. of  2 variables:
 $ Animal: Factor w/ 3 levels "Cat","Dog","Horse": 1 2 3
 $ Count : num  14 15 16