[R] read table

Prof Brian Ripley ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Tue Jun 5 19:56:21 CEST 2007


On Tue, 5 Jun 2007, Sarah Goslee wrote:

> The default separator in read.table is white space, so the first
> line (header) has 6 elements, the second line has 7 elements,
> and the third has 8 elements.
>
> Either delete the spaces in the car names, or use sep="\t"
> (or whatever is appropriate).

Or add quotes around character fields which contain spaces.
By default either single or double quotes will work (used in matched 
pairs, of course).

>
> ?read.table explains this.
>
> Sarah
>
> On 6/5/07, jiqiang yao <jiqiang123 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I'm a novice of R.
>>
>> I want to read the following table into R:
>> names               mpg    cyl  disp  hp  drat
>> Mazda RX4           21.0   6    160.0 110 3.90
>> Mazda RX4 Wag       21.0   6    160.0 110 3.90
>>
>> The command I used is:
>>> test <- read.table(file.choose(),header=T)
>>
>> The result is:
>> Error in read.table(file.choose(), header = T) :
>>         more columns than column names
>>
>> Can anybody tells me what is wrong?
>>
>> ___________________
>
>
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595



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