Package for opening .dat files

New to Julia
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Short question: I wanted to ask whether there are any inbuilt packages to load .dat files ?

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.dat is not a standard format — it is a catch-all file extension that can be just about anything. So, to answer your question we’d need to know the specific program creating the .dat file and/or the specific format of the contents.

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Oh, I actually wanted to get familiar with Julia so I can start contributing on Github, so decided to do my uni assignments (originally in R) using Julia. The .dat file is similar to csv.
I searched on the net for ways to load .dat files in Julia and this is what I had found…

hence my question…

4

If you would be able to share the first 10 lines of the .dat file it would be easier to answer your question…

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You are right, I should have done that in the first place.
Here is the screenshot of the .dat file when I open it in notepad

image

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Create a project:

mkdir myproject
cd myproject
julia --project="."

and execute this code:

using CSV
using DataFrames

df=DataFrame(CSV.File("data.dat", delim=" "))

Does it work?

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7

This is working perfectly, Thank you!
The answer in stackexchange link suggested that this won’t work everytime, if the spacing between data is variable. That is why I wanted to know whether there are any standard methods.
Thank you for your help!

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Alternatively you can also use Delimited Files · The Julia Language or GitHub - sl-solution/InMemoryDatasets.jl: Multithreaded package for working with tabular data in Julia . The first one for simple cases with low overhead, the second one allows you to define custom views on your data…

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9

Just pre-process the file to replace repeated spaces with a single space.

buf = IOBuffer(replace(read("data.dat", String), r" +" => ' '))
df=DataFrame(CSV.File(buf, delim=" "))
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You can also use the ignorerepeated keyword argument for CSV.jl (should avoid the extra pass through the data, which only matters if the file is huge): https://csv.juliadata.org/stable/reading.html#ignorerepeated

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Small nitpick, if you do r" +" (this is supposed to have two spaces but discourse swallows one when displaying, so maybe yours was actually the same…) instead it will not replace single spaces with single spaces :slight_smile:

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