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Re: help! to input data...

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg4228] Re: help! to input data...
  • From: welter at .ti.com (Jason Welter)
  • Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 03:28:06 -0400
  • Organization: Texas Instruments
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

In article <4pit53$jk5 at dragonfly.wolfram.com>, tcdoe+ at pitt.edu says...
>
>well, silly me.
>I thought i was pretty good at the basics of mathematica, but today i 
>tried to input some numerical data that was comma delimited. i.e.
>
>456,-45,21,0,5
>43,25,3,66,65
>...
>...
>...
>
>it is a large data file (10Mb+) with 5 numbers per line. i can't
>convert the commas to tabs easily.

You don't need to convert the commas to tabs.

Solution #1: Open the file and put a "{" before the first number
and a "}" after the last.  This creats one big list and can be
read in using something like data = <<"C:\\temp\\data.txt";

Solution #2: Load the file into MS Word and insert "{{" before the
first number and add a "}}" after the last.  Do a global search
and replace of the paragraph character with "},^P{" where ^P is
the paragraph character.  This creats an array  and can be
read in using something like data = <<"C:\\temp\\data.txt";
This preserves the structure of the data file, the first line of
data becomes record #1 data[[1]], the second number of the fifth
record is data[[5,2]].  You may need to clean up the end of the
file with your work processor.

I know there are ways to read almost anything in using ReadList
but quickly editing my data files with Excel and Work is a very
fast and easy to remember way to fix data access in Mathematica.


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