R Dataframe from a Text file with 2 Byts Separator

Question

if you can help with converting a big text:

sample of the text:

X1"II"ID_Sitze.x"II"Produktionsdatum.x"II"Herstellernummer.x"II"Werksnummer.x"II"Fehlerhaft.x"II"Fehlerhaft_Datum.x"II"Fehlerhaft_Fahrleistung.x"II"ID_Sitze.y"II"Produktionsdatum.y"II"Herstellernummer.y"II"Werksnummer.y"II"Fehlerhaft.y"II"Fehlerhaft_Datum.y"II"Fehlerhaft_Fahrleistung.y""1"II1II"K2LE1-109-1091-2"II2008-11-12II"109"II1091II1II2010-10-18II37080IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"2"II2II"K2LE1-109-1091-1"II2008-11-12II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"3"II3II"K2LE1-109-1091-12"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"4"II4II"K2LE1-109-1091-5"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"5"II5II"K2LE1-109-1091-40"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"6"II6II"K2LE1-109-1091-15"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"7"II7II"K2LE1-109-1091-31"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"8"II8II"K2LE1-109-1091-6"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"9"II9II"K2LE1-109-1091-8"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"10"II10II"K2LE1-109-1091-25"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"11"II11II"K2LE1-109-1091-24"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"12"II12II"K2LE1-109-1091-36"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"13"II13II"K2LE1-109-1091-33"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"14"II14II"K2LE1-109-1091-42"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"15"II15II"K2LE1-109-1091-14"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"16"II16II"K2LE1-109-1091-21"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"17"II17II"K2LE1-109-1091-43"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"18"II18II"K2LE1-109-1091-44"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA"19"II19II"K2LE1-109-1091-19"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II1II2010-10-19II37

with separator "II" to a Dataframe.

i have used:

df_BSt7<-readLines("Komponente_K2LE1.txt")

df_BST7<-str_replace_all(df_BSt7,"II",",")

df_BST7<-read.table(df_BST7,sep = ",")

head(df_BST7)

but I am always getting an Error

could not allocate memory (206 Mb) in C function 'R_AllocStringBuffer'

and when i call head() I am getting

'"X1","ID_Sitze.x","Produktionsdatum.x","Herstellernummer.x","Werksnummer.x","Fehlerhaft.x","Fehlerhaft_Datum.x","Fehlerhaft_Fahrleistung.x","ID_Sitze.y","Produktionsdatum.y","Herstellernummer.y","Werksnummer.y","Fehlerhaft.y","Fehlerhaft_Datum.y","Fehlerhaft_Fahrleistung.y""1",1,"K2LE1-109-1091-2",2008-11-12,"109",1091,1,2010-10-18,37080,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA"2",2,"K2LE1-109-1091-1",2008-11-12,"109",1091,0,NA,0,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA"3",3,"K2LE1-109-1091-12",2008-11-13,"109",1091,0,NA,0,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA"4",4,"K2LE1-109-1091-5",2008-11-13,"109",1091,0,NA,0,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA"5",5,"K2LE1-109-1091-40",2008-11-13,"109",1091,0,NA,0,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA"6",6,"K2LE1-109-1091-15",2008-11-13,"109",1091,0,NA,0,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA"7",7,"K2LE1-109-1091-31",2008-11-13,"109",1091,0,NA,0,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA"8",8,"K2LE1-109-1091-6",2008-11-13,"109",1091,0,NA,0,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA"9",9,"K2LE1-109-1091-8",2008-11-13,"109",1091,0,NA,0,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA"10",10,"K2LE1-109-109 [... abgeschnitten]

Answer 1

So, there are several possible problems, some might be specific to your examples.

Clean example data

First, let's take a look at your example data. In what you provide, there are no newlines, everything is on a single line. Is that the case in the original "Komponente_K2LE1.txt" file? If yes, we might need some more work to find where to add newlines (see below).

The first column name, X1 , only has a quote on the right. It can't work without the quote on the left: "X1"IIID_Sitze .

The saved dataframe has 16 columns, I expect because there is a row number at the beginning of each row which is not in the header. So we can add an additional column header to have 16 of them:

"row_nb"II"X1"II"ID_Sitze.x"II"Produktionsdatum.x"II"Herstellernummer.x"II"Werksnummer.x"II"Fehlerhaft.x"II"Fehlerhaft_Datum.x"II"

Then we have a small problem with line 19 which is truncated, I assume it comes from your copy/paste and that's not a problem with the full file. So let's forget about it for now. So I have this text:

raw_lines <- '"row_nb"II"X1"II"ID_Sitze.x"II"Produktionsdatum.x"II"Herstellernummer.x"II"Werksnummer.x"II"Fehlerhaft.x"II"Fehlerhaft_Datum.x"II"Fehlerhaft_Fahrleistung.x"II"ID_Sitze.y"II"Produktionsdatum.y"II"Herstellernummer.y"II"Werksnummer.y"II"Fehlerhaft.y"II"Fehlerhaft_Datum.y"II"Fehlerhaft_Fahrleistung.y"
"1"II1II"K2LE1-109-1091-2"II2008-11-12II"109"II1091II1II2010-10-18II37080IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"2"II2II"K2LE1-109-1091-1"II2008-11-12II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"3"II3II"K2LE1-109-1091-12"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"4"II4II"K2LE1-109-1091-5"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"5"II5II"K2LE1-109-1091-40"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"6"II6II"K2LE1-109-1091-15"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"7"II7II"K2LE1-109-1091-31"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"8"II8II"K2LE1-109-1091-6"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"9"II9II"K2LE1-109-1091-8"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"10"II10II"K2LE1-109-1091-25"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"11"II11II"K2LE1-109-1091-24"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"12"II12II"K2LE1-109-1091-36"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"13"II13II"K2LE1-109-1091-33"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"14"II14II"K2LE1-109-1091-42"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"15"II15II"K2LE1-109-1091-14"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"16"II16II"K2LE1-109-1091-21"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"17"II17II"K2LE1-109-1091-43"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA
"18"II18II"K2LE1-109-1091-44"II2008-11-13II"109"II1091II0IINAII0IINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINAIINA'

Now you are replacing "II" with "," and reading it with read.table() , which is perfectly correct, except that read.table() would assume you're giving a file name and throw an error as it can't open that connection (that file). To make it work you need this:

df_BST7<-str_replace_all(raw_lines,'II',",")
df_BST7 <- read.table(text = df_BST7,sep = ",")

So now that does run on my computer.

Side note, since you're already using the tidyverse, you could as well use that equivalent code instead:

df_BST7 <- str_replace_all(raw_lines,'II',",")
df_BST7 <- read_csv(df_BST7)

which could help with something later

The error message

Now the error message you get suggests it's a memory problem. I see 2 possibilities: the table is so big it can't fit in your computer's memory, or indeed your whole input table is on a single line, so that makes a very long line, which won't fit in memory.

Whole table too big

I don't think it's the problem here, but just in case, check how big the file on the disk is, and how much memory is free on your computer, and whether you could free up enough memory by just closing a few programs. Possibly you could save your modified text to disk and delete it from R's memory with rm(df_BSt7) , then load it directly from disk into df_BST7 . Since the raw text fits in memory, that should work. If memory is a challenge, you can replace read_csv() with read_csv_chunked() and process one chunk at a time.

All on one line

I think this is the most likely. Again, there are two possibilities.

Missing carriage return

Actually line breaks can be described in 2 ways, Unix-like systems (MacOS and GNU/Linux) use the symbol newline ( \n ), whereas Windows uses a pair of carriage return and newline ( \r\n ). I'm not sure how this could create problems inside R, but if your file was generated on a Unix-like system and you're trying to read it on Windows that's an explanation. Then the goal would become to replace \n with \r\n .

No line breaks at all

If there is absolutely no line break, neither \r nor \n , then we need to guess where they are. On a Unix system you could try awk or sed , but there are ways to do it in R. The following code should work, except the last column will need some cleaning up afterwards:

raw_lines2 <- str_remove_all(raw_lines2, "\r")

all_fields <- raw_lines2 %>%
  str_split("II") %>%
  unlist()
nb_lines <- (length(all_fields) - 1)/15

reconstruct_lines <- map_chr(0:(nb_lines-1), ~ paste(all_fields[(2+15*.):(16+15*.)], collapse = ",")) %>%
  paste(collapse = "\n")
cat(reconstruct_lines)