JestonBlu / fixedWidth

R Package for saving fixed width files

An R Package for Writing Configurable Fixed Width Files

This package is intended to help make creating fixed width files easier to generate in R where customization is needed on a column by column basis.

devtools::install_github("jestonblu/fixedWidth")

The main function behind this package is fw.make(conf, data). It leverages a configuration input stored as a list object to convert a data frame into a fixed width file.

Please be aware of the following:

• This package strips out all special characters from the input dataframe.
• Numeric data in decimal format will use the highest precision value as the basis for padding. It is recommended that you trim your numeric data to a standard decimal position.
• If required = FALSE then a default value needs to be supplied.
• The main fw.make function uses positional arguements so you do not need to label each individual element in your list.
• The name of each sublist (item1, item2 below) must match the names of the columns of the dataframe you are wanting to use as an input.

# Example Configuration List
conf = list(
  item1 = list(
    start = 1,
    end = 10,
    align = "l",
    padding = " ",
    trim = TRUE,
    required = TRUE
  ),
  item2 = list(
    start = 11,
    end = 20,
    align = "r",
    padding = 0,
    trim = TRUE,
    required = FALSE,
    default = " "
  )
)

# Example Data Frame
data = data.frame(item1 = c("AAAA", " BBBB", "CCCC"), item2 = c(254, 2.25, 1.4))

fw.make(conf, data, file = 'EXAMPLE')

# EXAMPLE file output
# AAAA      0000025400
# BBBB      0000000225
# CCCC      0000000140

Note The configuration design of this package borrowed heavily from another python package of the same name ShawnMilo/fixedwidth