[R] unexpected read.csv behavior

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 10/23/2006 5:54 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
> Example data in a recent post was:
>                        LandFill Ruminants
> United States (USA) 7777.214280   5528.16
> France               200.527083   1299.87
> Australia            185.878368   2448.17
> Russian Federation  1752.833400   2024.29
> Argentina            283.987320   2567.02
> Brazil              1048.422480   8839.61
> Colombia             265.125000   1307.61
> Mexico               981.023351   1814.89
> Ethiopia               9.380204   1237.49
> Sudan                 16.018494   1796.67
> India                553.425328  12360.30
> Pakistan              47.159393   2346.71
> China                455.680191   8041.79
> 
> In trying to play with this posting, I saved the data as a .csv file where the first row had only two entries and read:
>  , LandFill, Reminants  
> 
> I tried reading the data in with 
> read.csv("ex.csv", header=TRUE) 
> 
> To my surprise this created a 3 column dataframe with the first column labeled as X.  X was a factor.  According to the help file:
> 
> "If there is a header and the first row contains one fewer field than the number of columns, the first column in the input is used for the row names. Otherwise if row.names is missing, the rows are numbered. "

Your first row contains 3 columns, the first one blank.  You don't want 
a comma before LandFill.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> I got the expected default behavior of having the unlabeled column become row labels when I tried,
> read.csv("ex.csv", header=TRUE, row.names=1)
> 
> Is this unexpected behavior somehow related to how I designed a .csv file or is there something I'm misinterpreting in the documentation?
> 
> Thanks,
> Rob Baer
> 
>> version
>                _                           
> platform       i386-pc-mingw32             
> arch           i386                        
> os             mingw32                     
> system         i386, mingw32               
> status                                     
> major          2                           
> minor          4.0                         
> year           2006                        
> month          10                          
> day            03                          
> svn rev        39566                       
> language       R                           
> version.string R version 2.4.0 (2006-10-03)
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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