cleaning up imported data
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg84932] cleaning up imported data
- From: Tom Metcalf <thmetcalf at mac.com>
- Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 03:34:52 -0500 (EST)
I'm importing some data files (into Mathematica 6) that a colleague
prepared, where each line of the original data file represents a data
point, with several parameters recorded for each data point. The
problem is that for some of these data points, he used ditto marks to
specify that the value of a particular field is the same as the one
from the record above, and there are stretches with many ditto marks
in a row.
I want to convert the ditto marks to the real values, which I did with
the following Do loop, but the Do loop seems so... un-Mathematica-ish
and I'm wondering if there's a more elegant way to accomplish the
task.
hdA = Import[filename, "TSV"];
dup = hdA[[3,2]] (* manually set the ditto mark character *)
Do[hdA[[i, j]] =
If[hdA[[i, j]] == dup, hdA[[i - 1, j]], hdA[[i, j]]], {i,
Length[hdA]}, {j, Length[hdA[[2]]]}]
--Tom Metcalf