[R] read.table

[Berton Gunter]

?readLines

I'm sure Perl will do nicely, but you can also use readLines and grep() or
regexpr() the result in R as you would in Perl to find where the problem
lies. ?nchar can also help to find a non-printing character that may be
messing you up. It's no fun, I know. Excel files can be a particular pain,
especially in their handling of missings.

-- Bert Gunter
Genentech Non-Clinical Statistics
South San Francisco, CA
 
"The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning
process."  - George E. P. Box
 
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Sean Davis
> Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 12:12 PM
> To: r-help
> Subject: [R] read.table
> 
> I have a commonly recurring problem and wondered if folks would share 
> tips.  I routinely get tab-delimited text files that I need 
> to read in. 
>   In very many cases, I get:
> 
>  > a <- read.table('junk.txt.txt',header=T,skip=10,sep="\t")
> Error in scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = 
> quote, dec = 
> dec,  :
> 	line 67 did not have 88 elements
> 
> I am typically able to go through the file and find a single quote or 
> something like that causing the problem, but with a recent set of 
> files, I haven't been able to find such an issue.  What can I 
> do to get 
> around this problem?  I can use perl, also....
> 
> Thanks,
> Sean
> 
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