[R] read.table

[(Ted Harding)]

On 25-Feb-05 Ted Harding wrote:
> On 25-Feb-05 Sean Davis wrote:
>> 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....
> 
> Hi Sean,
> 
> This is only a shot in the dark, but your description has reminded
> me of similar messes in files which have been exported from Excel.
> 
> What I have often done in such cases, to check (e.g.) the numbers
> of fields in records (using 'awk' on Linux) is on the following
> lines:
> 
>   cat filename | awk 'BEGIN{FS="\t"} {print NF}' | unique

OOPS!!!

  cat filename | awk 'BEGIN{FS="\t"} {print NF}' | uniq

Ted.


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Date: 25-Feb-05                                       Time: 21:14:55
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