How do I read specially formatted data in a txt file into a data frame in R?

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Hi
I am working on an Amazon dataset which does not follow the traditional row and column format. Kindly advice on the best way to convert this into a easily manipulatable dataset in R.

Thank you

Dataset:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ruJKO-C1_PTLtulyPWsvoufJB6yX7vdx/view?usp=sharing

What I have tried:

Trying read.table("Software.txt") returns the error:

Error in scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = quote, dec = dec, :
line 1 did not have 6 elements

Posted 23-Oct-21 18:34pm

Kevin Paul 2021

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Richard MacCutchan 24-Oct-21 3:50am

Looking at the content it would appear that each 'item' in the file is a title/keyword and a text string, separated by a colon character. So knowing that you should be able to read it into some structure of your own.

Note: the review/text item may contain multiple lines of text, and is followed by a blank line which I assume is used as a section separator.

Kevin Paul 2021 24-Oct-21 9:49am

Hi!
Thank you so much for replying. I am a complete beginner to R, so I'm not sure I understand your explanation. Could you kindly provide some code or point me to resources that describe how to solve this problem?
Thanks in advance!

Richard MacCutchan 24-Oct-21 9:56am

Sorry I do not know R at all. I was just explaining the structure of the file, and how to read the items. If you are a complete beginner then I suggest you forget about this, go and find a good online tutorial (not YouTube) or book, and study the language.

Here is a useful link: CRAN: Manuals[^].

Maciej Los 26-Oct-21 15:39pm

read.table function - RDocumentation[^] has several input parameters. Use them.

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