[R] read.table -unexpected truncation of rows

[Maneesh]

Hi Dawn,
I had some similar problems, if I remember correctly I had apostrophe
characters like this:  '  in some text fields those and quotes " seem to
always be an issue when dealing with databases and table reading...


On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Dawn Field wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Are there any 'unallowed' (meta)characters that can cause R to parse
> a file incorrectly when using read.table?
> --Dawn
>
>
>
>
> Here the background if it's needed:
>
> I'm new to R, but have done some Perl.  I'm trying to read in a
> data.frame from a file using * as a record separator.
>
> data <- read.table("all_genomes.data",header=T,sep="*")
>
> This has been working great until now when I tried to parse my latest
> (biggest) file.  The file has been generated with the exact same
> script as other files that have imported correctly, but with
> different original data.
> R reads the new file and complains that the rows aren't all the same length.
>
> Here's some truncated output:
> [409] 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11
> [433] 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11
> [457]  4 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11
>
> ...
>
> [1201] 11 11 11 11 11 11
>    Error in read.table("all_genomes.data", header = T, as.is = TRUE,
> sep = "*") :
>            all rows must have the same length.
>    Execution halted
>
> In trying to figure out why it's reading four fields on line 457
> instead of the proper 11, I've
> * looked manually at the lines that are too short..(they have 11)
> * imported the file into excel to make sure the record separator is
> working as I expected The file imports perfectly into Excel using
> this separator with 11 fields for all entries.
> * looked for funny metacharacters that could be confusing the parser
>
>
> I still think there might be some characters in my original data that
> I parsed to make the data.frame in "all_genomes.data" that read.table
> doesn't like (my data is not all numeric), but I can't find them.
>
> I've been looking at help(read.table) and tried to go through the
> archive and FAQ for some advice, but haven't found any yet.
>
> Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I think R is great and
> I'm looking for all the tips I can get.
> Dawn
>
>
>
>

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