Read txt files containing nul character as seprator, such as \001?

Question

when I use r to read the txt files,I set the read.table sep para as sep="\001" or sep="\\001" both not worked.

                                                                        V1
1             886153044351\0010981623127\001\00113036806119\00113036806119
2           132693697611\0010\00118380389386\00113795105928\00113795105928
3             886134400554\0010981623127\001\00115033907649\00115033907649
4            550075776697\00115955516598\00115955516598\00113969121085\001
5             886156798054\0010918770552\001\00115977055775\00115977055775
6 132642200735\00118015668803\00118015668803\00118655109444\00118655109444

above is I use read table default into R. I use split function,but it also did not work for sep like above.

In notepad++,I replace \0001 with comma",",so I can read the data into R like a data frame.

If the data is big,and I cannot use notepad++ to replace the nul character,how can I do it?

Answer 1

Try using the read.delim function instead :

read.delim(
text = "V1
1 886153044351\0010981623127\001\00113036806119\00113036806119
2 132693697611\0010\00118380389386\00113795105928\00113795105928
3 886134400554\0010981623127\001\00115033907649\00115033907649
4 550075776697\00115955516598\00115955516598\00113969121085\001
5 886156798054\0010918770552\001\00115977055775\00115977055775
6 132642200735\00118015668803\00118015668803\00118655109444\00118655109444", 
sep = "\001", header = FALSE )


              V1          V2          V3          V4          V5
1             V1          NA          NA          NA          NA
2 1 886153044351   981623127          NA 13036806119 13036806119
3 2 132693697611           0 18380389386 13795105928 13795105928
4 3 886134400554   981623127          NA 15033907649 15033907649
5 4 550075776697 15955516598 15955516598 13969121085          NA
6 5 886156798054   918770552          NA 15977055775 15977055775
7 6 132642200735 18015668803 18015668803 18655109444 18655109444

Answer 2

I don't manage to use @Colin Fay's solution from a file.

A solution is:

• read the file as a character string
• replace the \001's with commas
• write the new string in a file
• read the new file as csv

Like this in R:

library(readr)
rawfile <- read_file("txt001sep.txt")
rawfile_csv <- gsub("\\\\001", ",", rawfile)
write_file(rawfile_csv, "myfile.csv")
read_csv("myfile.csv", col_names=FALSE)