【Question】

I would like to convert a file:

hello

world

123

 

bye

world

456

 

byee

world

456678

 

To a CSV file like this:

 

hello,world,123

bye,world,456

byee,world,456678

 

A solution offered:

dat <- readLines( # con = 'path/to/your/file'

   con = textConnection('hello

world

123

 

bye

world

456

 

byee

world

456678')

 

write.csv(

  t(matrix(

    dat[-seq(4,length(dat),4)], # Drop the spacer

    length(dat)/3,3), # Estimate columns

  file = "path/to/your.csv"

  ))

 

【Answer】

A natural way is to delete the blank lines, group data every 3 lines, and join lines up in every group with the comma. Here I achieve it with SPL (Structured Process Language):

	A
1	=file("d:\\source.txt").read@n().select(~!="")
2	=A1.group((#-1)\3).(~.concat@c())
3	=file("d:\\result.csv").write(A2)

A1: Read in content from source. txt and get non-blank lines.

A2: Group the selected data every 3 lines and concatenate lines in each group into a comma-separated string.

A3: Write A2’s result to result.csv.