[R] read.table with different row lengths

[Chris Poliquin]

For some reason R is reading in the file and creating new rows with  
fill=TRUE that begin with NA.  In other words, the R table I end up  
with has more rows than my text file.

These are very long time series (3500 observations).  Each of my text  
file has about 200 rows.  With the example I gave in the previous  
message though I want:

dim(ex)
[1] 3 5

So that the resulting table is actually:

1 0 3 4 5
1 3 5 6 8
2 1 1 1 4

Thanks for the help,
Chris

On Dec 10, 2008, at 2:17 PM, Jorge Ivan Velez wrote:

>
> I'm sorry, I mixed some code. Instead of what I sent you, try this:
>
> ex = read.table('example.txt',header=FALSE,fill=TRUE)
> ex
> #  V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8
> #1  1  0  3  4  5 NA NA NA
> #2  1  3  5  6  8  7  7 NA
> #3  2  1  1  1  4  7  7  7
>
> dim(ex)
> # [1] 3 8
>
> HTH,
>
> Jorge
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 2:15 PM, Jorge Ivan Velez <jorgeivanvelez at gmail.com 
> > wrote:
>
> Dear Chris,
>
> I saved the data you sent us as "example.txt", then I used:
>
> > ex = read.delim2('example.txt',header=TRUE,fill=TRUE)
> Warning message:
> In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote =  
> quote,  :
>   incomplete final line found by readTableHeader on 'example.txt'
>
> > ex
>   V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8
> 1  1  0  3  4  5 NA NA NA
> 2  1  3  5  6  8  7  7 NA
> 3  2  1  1  1  4  7  7  7
>
> > dim(ex)
> [1] 3 8
>
>
> Is this what you want?
>
> HTH,
>
> Jorge
>
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 1:50 PM, Chris Poliquin <poliquin at sas.upenn.edu 
> > wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I need to read in a series of text files with a time series on each  
> row.  The series are of different lengths and I'd like to just use  
> the first row as the length and have R ignore extra values in rows  
> that go over this length.
>
> For example:
>
> 1 0 3 4 5
> 1 3 5 6 8 7 7
> 2 1 1 1 4 7 7 7
>
> So the 7s would be ignored and I would have a 5x3 matrix.  I tried  
> creating a series of colClasses with NULLs for the extra values by  
> using max(count.fields(file)) - min(count.fields(file)) but this  
> didn't work and would be too time consuming for lots of files.
>
> fill=T doesn't seem to be working either.  When I use fill=T I get  
> extra rows for some reason in the table.  R doesn't seem to just be  
> appending NAs to the end of the short rows.
>
> Any way to accomplish this?
>
> - Chris
>
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