[R] problems in read.table

[Gabor Grothendieck]

See ?count.fields to get a vector of how many fields are on each line.
Also fill = TRUE on read.table() can be used to fill out short lines if
that is appropriate.

On 9/6/07, tkobayas at indiana.edu <tkobayas at indiana.edu> wrote:
> Dear R-users,
>
> I have encountered the following problem every now and then. But I was
> dealing with a very small dataset before, so it wasn't a problem (I
> just edited the dataset in Openoffice speadsheet). This time I have to
> deal with many large datasets containing commuting flow data. I
> appreciate if anyone could give me a hint or clue to get out of this
> problem.
>
> I have a .dat file called "1081.dat": 1001 means Birmingham, AL.
>
> I imported this .dat file using read.table like
> tmp<-read.table('CTPP3_ANSI/MPO3441_ctpp3_sumlv944.dat',header=T)
>
> Then I got this error message:
> Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  :
>        line 9499 did not have 209 elements
>
> Since I got an error message saying other rows did not have 209
> elements, I added skip=c(205,9499,9294)) in hoping that R would take
> care of this problem. But I got a similar error message:
> tmp<-read.table('CTPP3_ANSI/MPO3441_ctpp3_sumlv944.dat',header=T,skip=c(205,9499,9294))
> Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  :
>        line 9294 did not have 209 elements
> In addition: Warning message:
> the condition has length > 1 and only the first element will be used
> in: if (skip > 0) readLines(file, skip)
>
> Is there any way to let a R code to automatically skip problematic
> rows? Thank you very much!
>
> Taka
>
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