read.pattern: Read file or text string using a regular expression to...
In ggrothendieck/gsubfn: Utilities for Strings and Function Arguments

Description Usage Arguments Details Value See Also Examples

Read file or text string using a regular expression to separate fields.

1	read.pattern(file, pattern, perl = FALSE, text, sep = "\01", fileEncoding = "", ...)

`file`	See `read.table`.
`pattern`	A regular expression.
`perl`	logical. If `TRUE` then a perl style regular expression is expected.
`text`	See `read.table`.
`sep`	This should be a character that does not appear in any field. It is used for holding an intermediate form of the text.
`fileEncoding`	See `read.table`.
`...`	Further arguments passed to `read.table`.

The parenthesized portions of the regular expression are extracted as fields.

A data.frame.

See strapplyc, read.table.

# 3 space-separated fields.  The first field may have embedded spaces.
Lines <- "this is the first field 1 2
more text 3 4
"
pat <- "^(.*) +(\\S+) +(\\S+)$"
read.pattern(text = Lines, pattern = pat, as.is = TRUE)

# 3 space-separated fields.  The last field may have embedded spaces.
Lines2 <- "1 2 this is the first field
3 4 more text
"
pat2 <- "^(\\S+) +(\\S+) +(.*)$"
read.pattern(text = Lines2, pattern = pat2, as.is = TRUE)