Add filetypes: .raw, .asc, .dat, .mat (MATLAB)

[Stan125]

Hi there,

As I was trying out rio to maybe include it into GREA, I came across four filetypes which I occasionally use and which are not included. Including those filetypes might be a useful thing. You can look up the way I integrated them into my package here.

All the best,
Stani

[jsonbecker]

Looks like .mat uses R.matlab::readMat, but the other three extensions are just CSV files or a text file with some other separator? For .raw, .dat, and .asc, you can set format = 'delim' or txt or csv, whichever is appropriate.

For readMat, I'll defer to @leeper to see if he would want to import that function. If not, you could import/load rio and write your own function for it:

.import.rio_mat <- function(file, ...) {
  readMat(con = file, ...)
}

And then just call import(file = 'myfile.mat', format = 'mat').

This way rio can be imported into your package and have a custom method for that file type. You could theoretically provide methods the same as above for the other file types that alias to the appropriate existing .import.rio_* for that format.

[leeper]

I think @jsonbecker's answer here is the right way to handle these text files. I don't think .raw, .dat, or .asc are sufficiently standardized to merit handling them in a particular way, given that the format argument should provide sufficient flexibility here.

In terms of matlab support, there is a feature branch on this repo with experimental support for this. I'd appreciate any feedback on it since I do not regularly work with Matlab files.