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

Assuming that the white space is a delimiter, you can use the following mechanism:

• Use scan to read the file
• Convert the results to a matrix, then to a data.frame

The code:

x <- scan(file=textConnection("
Cat 14 Dog 15 Horse 16
"), what="character")

xx <- as.data.frame(matrix(x, ncol=2, byrow=TRUE))
names(xx) <- c("Animal", "Number")
xx$Number <- as.numeric(xx$Number)

The results:

xx

  Animal Number
1    Cat      1
2    Dog      2
3  Horse      3