Getting column positions and widths for parsing fixed width file formats
is painful. Tape measures are dangerous and useless for measuring column
widths. If your data is stored in fixed width files but
readr::read_fwf() can’t guess the column widths, then you need a new
tool.
Installation
You can install the released version of fwiffer from GitHub
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("gadenbuie/fwiffer")Fixed Width Files Made Easy 😅
Open your fixed-width data file and use Command + Alt + click to add cursors at the start of each column. They don’t have to be on the same line or in the same order!
Then choose the RStudio addin of your choice:
-
Cursors to Column Widths
-
Cursors to Column Start/End
And get back the readr::read_fwf() code you need. Edit the names in
col_names and move on with your day!
Column Widths
col_widths <- c(20, 10, 11)
col_names <- c("X01", "X02", "X03")
readr::read_fwf("inst/fwf-sample.txt", readr::fwf_widths(col_widths, col_names))## Parsed with column specification:
## cols(
## X01 = col_character(),
## X02 = col_character(),
## X03 = col_character()
## )
## # A tibble: 3 x 3
## X01 X02 X03
## <chr> <chr> <chr>
## 1 John Smith WA 418-Y11-411
## 2 Mary Hartford CA 319-Z19-434
## 3 Evan Nolan IL 219-532-c30
Column Start/End
col_starts <- c(1, 21, 31)
col_ends <- c(20, 30, 42)
col_names <- c("X01", "X02", "X03")
readr::read_fwf("inst/fwf-sample.txt", readr::fwf_positions(col_starts, col_ends, col_names))## Parsed with column specification:
## cols(
## X01 = col_character(),
## X02 = col_character(),
## X03 = col_character()
## )
## # A tibble: 3 x 3
## X01 X02 X03
## <chr> <chr> <chr>
## 1 John Smith WA 418-Y11-4111
## 2 Mary Hartford CA 319-Z19-4341
## 3 Evan Nolan IL 219-532-c301