fastReadfwf: fastReadfwf: A package for fast-reading fixed-width files.
In david-salgado/fastReadfwf: Fast read of fwf files with arbitrary input schema

Description Details

The fastReadfwf package provides a standardised wrapper for functions fread and read_fwf from packages data.table and readr.

The premise is the construction of a standardised schema to read each file. This schema is essentially a data matrix with columns:

variable: the name of the variable.
width: the number of positions which the values of this variable occupies in the file.
initialPos: initial position of the field whic hthe values of this variable occupies in the file.
finalPos: final position of the field whic hthe values of this variable occupies in the file.
type: type of the variable. It must be either num or char.
valueRegEx: regular expression for the values of this variable.
description: textual description of the variable.

This standardised schema is implemented as an S4 class called StfwfSchema with constructors based on different input file formats (xlsx, csv, ...) specified by the user.

The package provides different getters and setters for objects of this class.

The core functions of the package, apart from the class management functions, are:

fread_fwf, to read fixed-width files returning either data.tables or tibbles.
validateValues, to validate the value of each variable in the fixed-width file according to the regular expressions specified in the standardised schema.