[R] Importing Large Dataset into Excel

[Philippe Grosjean]

The problem is often a misspecification of the comment.char argument. 
For read.table(), it defaults to '#'. This means that everywhere you 
have a '#' char in your Excel sheet, the rest of the line is ignored. 
This results in a different number of items per line.

You should better use read.csv() which provides better default arguments 
for your particular problem.
Best,

Philippe Grosjean


jim holtman wrote:
> ?count.fields
> 
> count.fields will tell you how many items are in each line.  As you
> said, they should all be the same, but this will confirm it.
> 
> field.count <- count.fields("newborn edit.csv", sep=",")
> table(field.count)  # determine count of the fields on a line
> 
> On Dec 11, 2007 7:15 PM, Wayne Aldo Gavioli <wgavioli at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>>
>> I seem to be having a problem importing a data set from Excel into R.  I'm using
>> the "read.table" command to import the data with the following line of code:
>>
>>> newborn<-read.table("newborn edit.csv", header=T, sep=",")
>>
>> where "newborn edit.csv" is the name of the file.  Unfortunately, I'm getting
>> back the following error message:
>>
>>
>> "Error in scan(file,, what, nmax, sep, dc, quote, skip, nlines, na.string, :
>> line 528 did not have 44 elements"
>>
>>
>> As far as I can tell, line 528 of the spreadsheet table does have the same
>> number of elements as the other rows - by chance can this error message mean
>> anything else?  Also, is there an easier way to import data from R into Excel
>> using a single line of R code?
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>>
>> Wayne
>>
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>>
> 
> 
>