Importing Any File into R

Using the function scan any style file can be read, e.g.,

invitro.cals -> function(string)
{
# string is the directory path to all the files to be used
# paste() adds a file name to the directory path
# what is the type of file to be used
# The result is an unformatted string of numbers in R
thalf <- scan(paste(string, "std.decay.time", sep = ""), what=numeric())
}
 

See “help(scan)” for a complete list of parameters than can be read.

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Transcript

But it's actually possible to support any type of file so that we can use the scan function - so, in this case, we say that we want to put into this data frame the result of scanning, rebuild the string, which in this case included a partial string "std.decay.time", the separators for spaces and the values were numeric, and violà we will proceed to load that into this dataframe. And as I said, we can create a function call for this - so that we can use it again and again, if that's the kind of data that we're going to be processing.