[Rd] read.table error upon package installation (PR#8230)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 21 Oct 2005, McGehee, Robert wrote:

> Thanks for this.
>
> I tried switching the file extension from txt to tab, but it seems to
> still split on whitespace rather than tabs.
>
> My goal is to create a file that is both readable by R and by a
> spreadsheet program, and that may contain white spaces. If tab-delimited
> separation is not currently supported on load time, a CSV file would
> also be a natural candidate. Unfortunately for me, it seems that R
> expects the CSV file in the 'data' subdirectory to be delimited by
> semi-colons rather than commas (which seems odd and might be worthy of
> mention in the Writing R Extensions Manual), and the particular
> spread-sheet program I use uses commas to delimit CSV files. So, then, I
> think that I will be unable to use 'data' subdirectory to load this data
> using data(), but any feedback on this is welcomed.

Using quotes, e.g. "A B C" may work?

>
> Thanks,
> Robert
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk [mailto:ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk]
> Sent: Friday, October 21, 2005 1:58 AM
> To: r-devel at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Cc: R-bugs at biostat.ku.dk
> Subject: Re: [Rd] read.table error upon package installation (PR#8230)
>
>
> What is the R error here?
>
> The default delimiter in read.table is not \t but whitespace, so the
> first
> example has 2 and 3 rows (fine for header=T) and the second has 2 and 4
> rows.
>
> On Fri, 21 Oct 2005 Robert.McGehee at geodecapital.com wrote:
>
>> Upon upgrading to R 2.2.0 on my Windows box, I found that one of my
>> packages no longer compiled, giving this error:
>>
>> Error in read.table(zfile, header =3D TRUE) :
>> 	more columns than column names
>> Execution halted
>>
>> After removing every line of code from my package and still not being
>> able to compile it, I found the error to be related to a .txt file in
> my
>> data directory. I reduced my data file to a very simple example which
>> causes the error, and a nearly identical file which does not cause the
>> problem.
>>
>> A file with these contents causes the error (I am using \t to indicate
>> the usual tab delimiter).
>> x	\t	y
>> A B C	\t	DEF
>>
>> However, if I remove one of the spaces between A and B or B and C, the
>> package compiles fine:
>> x	\t	y
>> A BC	\t	DEF
>>
>> I can only guess that there is some kind of parsing problem when there
>> is more than one space between tab delimiters.
>
> Looks more like a user misunderstanding of ?data.
>
> -- 
> Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
> Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
> University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
> 1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
> Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595