[R] read.table error

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 4 Sep 2008, Steve Murray wrote:

>
> Dear all,
>
> I have a tab-delimited text (.txt) file which I'm trying to read into R. 
> This file is of column format - there are in fact 3 columns and 259201 
> rows (including the column headers). I've been using the following 
> commands, but receive an error each time which prevents the data from 
> being read in:

How about telling R it is tab-delimited?  Use read.delim or at least 
sep="\t".

Also, see the footer to this message: we are not clairvoyant and cannot 
see the file unless you show us part of it.

With a file of that size you should study the 'R Data Import/Export 
Manual' and take some steps to read it in efficiently (e.g. specify 
nrows and colClasses).

>> Jan <- read.table("JanuaryAvBurntArea.txt", header=TRUE)
> Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  :
>  line 1 did not have 6 elements
>
>
> I tried removing the 'header' argument, but receive a similar message:
>
>> Jan <- read.table("JanuaryAvBurntArea.txt")
> Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  :
>  line 2 did not have 6 elements
>
>
> What's more confusing about this is that I know that none of the lines 
> have 6 elements! They're not supposed to! Each row only has 3 values 
> (one per column)!

I suspect there is whitespace in the 'values'.

>
> As a final resort I tried 'scan':
>
> <- scan("JanuaryAvBurntArea.txt")
> Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  :
>  scan() expected 'a real', got 'Latitude'
>
> ...which is obviously something to do with there being a header as the first row, but the 'scan' command doesn't seem to have an equivalent of 'header=TRUE' like read.table...?
>
>
> If anyone is able to shed some light on why I'm receiving these errors, and how I can get the data into R, then I'd be very grateful to hear them! I suspect I'm doing something very basic which is wrong!
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Steve
>
>
>
>
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-- 
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