[R] read.table understands comment field and ignores text

[Marc Schwartz]

On Apr 22, 2010, at 2:05 PM, Jack T. wrote:

> 
> Hi I'm trying to import a large csv file without quotes around each field. 
> This creates some problems when there are "#" characters in certain strings
> as R understands its comment field and ignores the rest of the line.
> 
> Here's an example:
> 
> var1, var2, var3, var4
> one, two, three, four
> 
>  Use this in R to get off clipboard:
> 
>  read.table("clipboard", header=F, sep=",",na.strings=c("NULL", ""),
> dec=".", strip.white=TRUE, fill=T)
> 
> Now try it with this table:
> 
> var1, var2, var3, var4
> one#, two, three, four
> 
> Notice R ignores everything after the # character.  Is this something that
> can be fixed?


Change the 'comment.char' argument to "":

  read.table(...., comment.char = "")

See ?read.table for more information.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz