[R] read.table error

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Use the count.fields function to find out how many fields it thinks
each row has.

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 5:50 PM, Forafo San<ppv.grps at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm receiving an error on attempting to use the read.table() function
> to read in data from a tab-delimited file. The file has more than
> 60,000 rows with 94 tab-delimited columns. However, the error occurs
> on row 3 of the file:
>
>> wl <-read.table("sr003lines.tab", header=T, sep="\t")
> Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  :
>  line 3 did not have 94 elements
>
> On receiving this error, I wrote a python script to go through the
> file to find rows with fewer than the 94 columns -- python finds that
> the first row with fewer than 94 columns is 1,706 -- much later than
> what R reports.  R keeps running into this problem even with my
> python-massaged input file that I know for sure contains only rows
> with 94 columns.
>
> I also copied the first 4 rows of the input file into a separate file
> -- R isn't able to get past this problem.  I examined the row (line 3)
> of the input file -- the only thing that's unique about this line is
> that it contains a long string (236 characters) in a column that in
> the previous rows was empty.  Any chance that this sort of thing would
> cause R to run into a road block?
>
> Thanks,
> Premal P. Vora
> Associate Prof. Finance
> Penn State Harrisburg
>
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