vroom_fwf: Read a fixed-width file into a tibble

In vroom: Read and Write Rectangular Text Data Quickly

Read a fixed-width file into a tibble

Description

Fixed-width files store tabular data with each field occupying a specific range of character positions in every line. Once the fields are identified, converting them to the appropriate R types works just like for delimited files. The unique challenge with fixed-width files is describing where each field begins and ends. vroom tries to ease this pain by offering a few different ways to specify the field structure:

• fwf_empty() - Guesses based on the positions of empty columns. This is the default. (Note that fwf_empty() returns 0-based positions, for internal use.)

• fwf_widths() - Supply the widths of the columns.

• fwf_positions() - Supply paired vectors of start and end positions. These are interpreted as 1-based positions, so are off-by-one compared to the output of fwf_empty().

• fwf_cols() - Supply named arguments of paired start and end positions or column widths.

Note: fwf_empty() cannot work with a connection or with any of the input types that involve a connection internally, which includes remote and compressed files. The reason is that this would necessitate reading from the connection twice. In these cases, you'll have to either provide the field structure explicitly with another ⁠fwf_*()⁠ function or download (and decompress, if relevant) the file first.

Usage

vroom_fwf(
  file,
  col_positions = fwf_empty(file, skip, n = guess_max),
  col_types = NULL,
  col_select = NULL,
  id = NULL,
  locale = default_locale(),
  na = c("", "NA"),
  comment = "",
  skip_empty_rows = TRUE,
  trim_ws = TRUE,
  skip = 0,
  n_max = Inf,
  guess_max = 100,
  altrep = TRUE,
  num_threads = vroom_threads(),
  progress = vroom_progress(),
  show_col_types = NULL,
  .name_repair = "unique"
)

fwf_empty(file, skip = 0, col_names = NULL, comment = "", n = 100L)

fwf_widths(widths, col_names = NULL)

fwf_positions(start, end = NULL, col_names = NULL)

fwf_cols(...)

Arguments

file	Either a path to a file, a connection, or literal data (either a single string or a raw vector). file can also be a character vector containing multiple filepaths or a list containing multiple connections. Files ending in .gz, .bz2, .xz, or .zip will be automatically decompressed. Files starting with ⁠http://⁠, ⁠https://⁠, ⁠ftp://⁠, or ⁠ftps://⁠ will be automatically downloaded. Remote compressed files (.gz, .bz2, .xz, .zip) will be automatically downloaded and decompressed. Literal data is most useful for examples and tests. To be recognised as literal data, wrap the input with I().
col_positions	Column positions, as created by fwf_empty(), fwf_widths(), fwf_positions(), or fwf_cols(). To read in only selected fields, use fwf_positions(). If the width of the last column is variable (a ragged fwf file), supply the last end position as NA.
col_types	One of NULL, a cols() specification, or a string. If NULL, all column types will be inferred from guess_max rows of the input, interspersed throughout the file. This is convenient (and fast), but not robust. If the guessed types are wrong, you'll need to increase guess_max or supply the correct types yourself. Column specifications created by list() or cols() must contain one column specification for each column. If you only want to read a subset of the columns, use cols_only(). Alternatively, you can use a compact string representation where each character represents one column: c = character i = integer I = big integer n = number d = double l = logical f = factor D = date T = date time t = time ? = guess _ or - = skip By default, reading a file without a column specification will print a message showing the guessed types. To suppress this message, set show_col_types = FALSE.
col_select	Columns to include in the results. You can use the same mini-language as dplyr::select() to refer to the columns by name. Use c() to use more than one selection expression. Although this usage is less common, col_select also accepts a numeric column index. See ?tidyselect::language for full details on the selection language.
id	Either a string or 'NULL'. If a string, the output will contain a column with that name with the filename(s) as the value, i.e. this column effectively tells you the source of each row. If 'NULL' (the default), no such column will be created.
locale	The locale controls defaults that vary from place to place. The default locale is US-centric (like R), but you can use locale() to create your own locale that controls things like the default time zone, encoding, decimal mark, big mark, and day/month names.
na	Character vector of strings to interpret as missing values. Set this option to character() to indicate no missing values.
comment	A string used to identify comments. Any line that starts with the comment string at the beginning of the file (before any data lines) will be ignored. Unlike vroom(), comment lines in the middle of the file are not filtered out.
skip_empty_rows	Should blank rows be ignored altogether? i.e. If this option is TRUE then blank rows will not be represented at all. If it is FALSE then they will be represented by NA values in all the columns.
trim_ws	Should leading and trailing whitespace (ASCII spaces and tabs) be trimmed from each field before parsing it?
skip	Number of lines to skip before reading data. If comment is supplied any commented lines are ignored after skipping.
n_max	Maximum number of lines to read.
guess_max	Maximum number of lines to use for guessing column types. See vignette("column-types", package = "readr") for more details.
altrep	Control which column types use Altrep representations, either a character vector of types, TRUE or FALSE. See vroom_altrep() for for full details.
num_threads	Number of threads to use when reading and materializing vectors. If your data contains newlines within fields the parser will automatically be forced to use a single thread only.
progress	Display a progress bar? By default it will only display in an interactive session and not while executing in an RStudio notebook chunk. The display of the progress bar can be disabled by setting the environment variable VROOM_SHOW_PROGRESS to "false".
show_col_types	Control showing the column specifications. If TRUE column specifications are always shown, if FALSE they are never shown. If NULL (the default), they are shown only if an explicit specification is not given in col_types, i.e. if the types have been guessed.
.name_repair	Handling of column names. The default behaviour is to ensure column names are "unique". Various repair strategies are supported: "minimal": No name repair or checks, beyond basic existence of names. "unique" (default value): Make sure names are unique and not empty. "check_unique": No name repair, but check they are unique. "unique_quiet": Repair with the unique strategy, quietly. "universal": Make the names unique and syntactic. "universal_quiet": Repair with the universal strategy, quietly. A function: Apply custom name repair (e.g., name_repair = make.names for names in the style of base R). A purrr-style anonymous function, see rlang::as_function(). This argument is passed on as repair to vctrs::vec_as_names(). See there for more details on these terms and the strategies used to enforce them.
col_names	Either NULL, or a character vector column names.
n	Number of lines the tokenizer will read to determine file structure. By default it is set to 100.
widths	Width of each field. Use NA as the width of the last field when reading a ragged fixed-width file.
start, end	Starting and ending (inclusive) positions of each field. Positions are 1-based: the first character in a line is at position 1. Use NA as the last value of end when reading a ragged fixed-width file.
...	Named or unnamed arguments, each addressing one column. Each input should be either a single integer (a column width) or a pair of integers (column start and end positions). All arguments must have the same shape, i.e. all widths or all positions.

Details

Here's a enhanced example using the contents of the file accessed via vroom_example("fwf-sample.txt").

         1         2         3         4
123456789012345678901234567890123456789012
[     name 20      ][state 10][  ssn 12  ]
John Smith          WA        418-Y11-4111
Mary Hartford       CA        319-Z19-4341
Evan Nolan          IL        219-532-c301

Here are some valid field specifications for the above (they aren't all equivalent! but they are all valid):

fwf_widths(c(20, 10, 12), c("name", "state", "ssn"))
fwf_positions(c(1, 30), c(20, 42), c("name", "ssn"))
fwf_cols(state = c(21, 30), last = c(6, 20), first = c(1, 4), ssn = c(31, 42))
fwf_cols(name = c(1, 20), ssn = c(30, 42))
fwf_cols(name = 20, state = 10, ssn = 12)

Examples

fwf_sample <- vroom_example("fwf-sample.txt")
writeLines(vroom_lines(fwf_sample))

# You can specify column positions in several ways:
# 1. Guess based on position of empty columns
vroom_fwf(fwf_sample, fwf_empty(fwf_sample, col_names = c("first", "last", "state", "ssn")))
# 2. A vector of field widths
vroom_fwf(fwf_sample, fwf_widths(c(20, 10, 12), c("name", "state", "ssn")))
# 3. Paired vectors of start and end positions
vroom_fwf(fwf_sample, fwf_positions(c(1, 30), c(20, 42), c("name", "ssn")))
# 4. Named arguments with start and end positions
vroom_fwf(fwf_sample, fwf_cols(name = c(1, 20), ssn = c(30, 42)))
# 5. Named arguments with column widths
vroom_fwf(fwf_sample, fwf_cols(name = 20, state = 10, ssn = 12))

vroom documentation built on Jan. 27, 2026, 5:09 p.m.