I have a large text file with a variable number of fields in each row. The first entry in each row corresponds to a biological pathway, and each subsequent entry corresponds to a gene in that pathway. The first few lines might look like this
path1 gene1 gene2
path2 gene3 gene4 gene5 gene6
path3 gene7 gene8 gene9
I need to read this file into R as a list, with each element being a character vector, and the name of each element in the list being the first element on the line, for example:
> pathways <- list(
+ path1=c("gene1","gene2"),
+ path2=c("gene3","gene4","gene5","gene6"),
+ path3=c("gene7","gene8","gene9")
+ )
>
> str(pathways)
List of 3
$ path1: chr [1:2] "gene1" "gene2"
$ path2: chr [1:4] "gene3" "gene4" "gene5" "gene6"
$ path3: chr [1:3] "gene7" "gene8" "gene9"
>
> str(pathways$path1)
chr [1:2] "gene1" "gene2"
>
> print(pathways)
$path1
[1] "gene1" "gene2"
$path2
[1] "gene3" "gene4" "gene5" "gene6"
$path3
[1] "gene7" "gene8" "gene9"
...but I need to do this automatically for thousands of lines. I saw a similar question posted here previously, but I couldn't figure out how to do this from that thread.
Thanks in advance.