Read MediaWiki's WikiTable text and convert it into a R dataframe

WikiTable2Dataframe.R

# Read MediaWiki's WikiTable text and convert it into a dataframe

lines <- readLines(file.choose())

columns <- NULL
row <- NULL
df <- data.frame()
ncol <- 0
for(line in lines) {
  if((m <- sub("^\\! *(.*)$", "\\1", line)) != line){
    columns <- append(columns, gsub(" +$","", gsub("^ +","",m)))
  }
  if((m <- regexpr("^\\|-", line)) != -1) {
    df <- rbind(df, row)
    row <- data.frame()
    ncol <- 0
  }
  if((m <- sub("^\\| (.*)$","\\1", line)) != line) {
    ncol <- ncol+1
    #browser()
    column <- data.frame(gsub(" +$","", gsub("^ +","",m)))
    colnames(column) <- columns[ncol]
    if(nrow(row) != 0)
      row <- cbind(row, column)
    else
      row <- column
  }
}

# resulted data frame
df