The “read_fwf” Function in R

• Package: readr

• Purpose: To read a fixed-width file into a data frame.

• General Class: Data Import

• Required Argument(s):

• file: The path to the fixed-width file to read.

• Notable Optional Arguments:

• col_positions: A numeric vector specifying the widths of each field in the file, using the specialized “fwf_widths” function.

• col_names (in the fwf_widths function): Supply custom column names to the imported data set.

• skip: Integer. Number of lines to skip before reading data. The default is 0.

• na: Character vector specifying additional strings to interpret as missing values. The default is c(““,”NA”).

• Example (with Explanation):

• # Load necessary packages
  library(readr)
  
  # Define the fixed-width widths
  widths <- c(5, 10, 8)
  
  # Read a fixed-width file into a data frame
  data <- readfwf("data.txt", col_positions = fwf_widths(widths))
  
  # Display the structure of the data frame
  str(data)

• In this example, the readfwf function from the readr package is used to read a fixed-width file named “data.txt” into a data frame called data. The widths of each field in the file are specified using the colpositions argument and the fwf_widths functions. By default, the function assumes that the first row of the file contains column names. The structure of the resulting data frame is then displayed using the str function. This function is commonly used to import fixed-width text data into R for analysis.