[R] Problem with read.table()

[Kristian Skrede Gleditsch]

Thanks to all who responded to my earlier message. The problem lies in 
that apostrophes (i.e., ') in some of the text fields are read as quotes.

The file can be read without problems setting quotes="" in read.table.

Incidently, read.delim() also works, even without setting quotes="" 
explicitly.

best regards,

Kristian Skrede Gleditsch
Department of Political Science, UCSD
(On leave, University of Essex, 2005-6)
Tel: +44 1206 872499, Fax: +44 1206 873234
Email: kgleditsch at ucsd.edu or ksg at essex.ac.uk
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~kgledits/


Kristian Skrede Gleditsch wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I have encountered a strange problem with read.table(). When I try to 
> read a tab delimited file I get an error message for line 260 not being 
> equal to 14 (see below).
> 
> Using count.fields() suggests that a number of lines have length not 
> equal to 14, but not 260.
> 
> Looking at the actual file, however, I cannot see anything wrong with 
> any lines. They all seem to have length 14, there are no double tabs 
> etc., and the file reads correctly in other programs. Does anyone have 
> any suggestions as to what this might stem from?
> 
> I have placed a copy of the file at 
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/~kgledits/archigos_v.1.9.asc
> 
> regards,
> Kristian Skrede Gleditsch
> 
> 
>  > archigos1.9 <- read.table("c:/work/work12/archigos/archigos_v.1.9.asc",
> +     sep="\t",header=T,as.is=T,row.names=NULL)
> Error in scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = quote, dec = 
> dec,  :
>         line 260 did not have 14 elements
>  > a <- count.fields("c:/work/work12/archigos/archigos_v.1.9.asc",sep="\t")
>  > a <- data.frame(c(1:length(a)),a)
>  > a[a[,2]!=14,]
>      c.1.length.a..  a
> 150             150 10
> 313             313 10
> 424             424 10
> 1189           1189  5
> 1510           1510 10
> 1514           1514 10
> 1590           1590  5
> 1600           1600 10
> 1612           1612 10
> 1618           1618 10
> 1619           1619 10
> 1709           1709 10
> 1722           1722 10
> 1981           1981 10
> 1985           1985 10
> 2112           2112 10
> 2178           2178 10
> 2208           2208 10
> 2224           2224 10
> 2530           2530  5
> 2536           2536  5
> 2573           2573  5
> 2928           2928  5