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

Method 1: (extracting from long vector with seq()

> inp <- scan(textConnection("Cat 14 Dog 15 Horse 16"), what="character")
Read 6 items
> data.frame(animal = inp[seq(1,length(inp), by=2)], 
             numbers =as.numeric(inp[seq(2,length(inp), by=2)]))
  animal numbers
1    Cat      14
2    Dog      15
3  Horse      16

Method 2: (using the "what" argument to scan to greater effect)

> inp <- data.frame(scan(textConnection("Cat 14 Dog 15 Horse 16"), 
                     what=list("character", "numeric")))
Read 3 records
> names(inp) <- c("animals", "numbers")
> inp
  animals numbers
1     Cat      14
2     Dog      15
3   Horse      16

This is a refinement of the Method 2: (was worried about possibility of very long column names in the result from scan() so I read the help page again and added names to the what argument values:

inp <- data.frame(scan(textConnection("Cat 14 Dog 15 Horse 16"), 
                        what=list( animals="character", 
                                   numbers="numeric")))
Read 3 records
> inp
  animals numbers
1     Cat      14
2     Dog      15
3   Horse      16