Hi all,

I'm trying to import a large amount of numerical data (representing DNA sequences) into either R or Matlab. It is currently saved as a txt file. The issue I'm running into is there is currently nothing separating data values right now.

Ex the data looks like; 1413213421423434144234142

and I need it to look like; 1 4 1 3 2 1 3 4 2 1 4 2 3 4 or as a CSV.

I'm really bad with word, is there a way to have it insert a comma or white space? Right now R is getting confused and thinks the value for the first entry in each row is simply infinity and the custom delimiter in R assumes that "" means that there is a single space.

Thanks!

I would suggest using recursion to add the spaces.
I'm sure whatever language you are good at there is some tutorials to do what you need.

If your whole file is just made up of those 4 characters (which I guess is likely if it's DNA) then you could just do a search and replace "1" to "1 ", "2" to "2 ", etc. You'd end up with an extra space at the end of the line but that prolly will still parse OK.

Juk

Word doesn't work very well on large files (do you mean many terabytes?).

But if the file fits in word it's very easy.

Search for: <Any Character>

Replace With: <Find What Text><space>

<space> is the space character on your keyboard.

<Any Character> is found on the Special section of the Find And Replace menu. Type control-h to bring up the Find and Replace menu.

<Find What Text> is also on the Special menu.

Hope this helps.

Never used R but you should be able to read this file directly into matlab without the modification. dlmread should do the trick

I suggested reading them in as characters in your other thread.

If you have python installed you can type this into your terminal on a mac or linux machine.

Example: