I'm trying to read some files where the column names (for the most part) are followed by two digits indicating the year. I'd like to select only a few of the >100 columns from each file, but currently have to do a lot more leg work to get this to work because though the column pattern is the same across files, the full name is not.
Specifically, I'm reading some csv-ified files from here.
I might want the SCHNAM (school name) column for several years; they would be stored as, e.g., SCHNAM06 for 2006-07, SCHNAM07 for 2007-08, SCHNAM08 for 2008-09, and so on.
It would be great to do fread(file_name, select = grep('SCHNAM', .)). But instead I have to do something along the lines of readLines(file_name, n = 1L) %>% strsplit(',') %>% el %>% grep('SCHNAM', .) first.
I'm trying to read some files where the column names (for the most part) are followed by two digits indicating the year. I'd like to select only a few of the >100 columns from each file, but currently have to do a lot more leg work to get this to work because though the column pattern is the same across files, the full name is not.
Specifically, I'm reading some csv-ified files from here.
I might want the SCHNAM (school name) column for several years; they would be stored as, e.g., SCHNAM06 for 2006-07, SCHNAM07 for 2007-08, SCHNAM08 for 2008-09, and so on.
It would be great to do
fread(file_name, select = grep('SCHNAM', .)). But instead I have to do something along the lines ofreadLines(file_name, n = 1L) %>% strsplit(',') %>% el %>% grep('SCHNAM', .)first.