[R] Probelm with read.table

[Martyn Plummer]

On Thu, 2003-12-11 at 11:31, Arnaud_Amsellem at ssga.com wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I have the following text file (mytextfile.txt)
> 
> 738307      527178      714456      557955
> #N/A  17.42 6.22  4.73
> #N/A  17.3  6.23  4.75
> #N/A  17.29 6.17  4.7
> #N/A  17.07 6.12  4.6
> #N/A  17.27 6.19  4.7
> #N/A  17.72 6.4   4.78
> #N/A  17.12 6.19  4.75
> #N/A  17.07 6.15  4.65
> #N/A  17.03 6.07  4.64
> #N/A  17.38 6.13  4.7
> #N/A  17.38 6.13  4.7
> #N/A  17.38 6.13  4.7
> #N/A  17.38 6.13  4.7
> #N/A  17.34 6.28  4.7
> 10    17.57 6.33  4.75
> 11    17.57 6.33  4.75
> 12    17.57 6.33  4.75
> 13    17.39 6.25  4.87
> 14    17.15 6.33  5.06
> 15    17.05 6.21  5
> 16    16.87 6.14  5.15
> 17    16.72 6.27  5.23
> 
> I use the following command:
> mydf <- read.table(file="mytextfile.txt", header = T, sep="\t",na.strings="
> #NA")
> 
> When the above command is applied I have only 8 lines in mydf. I tried many
> options but nothing seems to get me the entire file. If the #NA are not in
> the first column it seems to work fine i.e I get  22 lines in mydf.
> Anyone would know a way of getting the entire file even if #NA are in the
> first column?

The character "#" is a comment character, so lines beginning in "#"
are ignored.  To read these lines, set the parameter comment.char to
something else, e.g.

read.table("mytextfile.txt", header=TRUE, sep="\t", na.strings="#N/A",
comment.char="%")

Martyn