[R] count.fields vs read.table

[Andrew C. Ward]

Dear R-help,

I am using R 2.1.1 on Windows XP.

I have a tab-delimited data file that has been exported by SAS. The file is reasonably big so I 
apologise that I can't give a good toy example. I do this:
      table(count.fields("t1.txt", sep="\t", quote="\""))
      248 
      809 
So I have 809 lines, each with 248 fields.

There's something wrong with me, my data or both, since when I try to read the data, I get this:
      dim(read.table("t1.txt", sep="\t", quote="\"", header=TRUE)
      [1] 425 248

I wonder if someone could be kind enough to point out what I've done wrong or suggest some tips 
for managing this, please? Thanks for your advice!


Regards,

Andrew C. Ward

Department of Chemical Engineering
The University of Queensland
Brisbane Qld 4072 Australia
s195404 at student.uq.edu.au
acward at tpg.com.au