[R] How to not to terminate read.table if the input file is empty?

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Please give reproducible example, more information on your
troubleshooting and sessionInfo().  Cannot reproduce:

> pathname <- "empty.txt"
> cat(file=pathname)
> print(file.info(pathname))
          size isdir mode               mtime               ctime
empty.txt    0 FALSE  666 2010-01-01 12:50:55 2010-01-01 12:45:34
                        atime exe
empty.txt 2010-01-01 12:45:34  no
> read.table(pathname)
Error in read.table(pathname) : no lines available in input
> sessionInfo()
R version 2.10.1 Patched (2009-12-24 r50837)
i386-pc-mingw32

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

/Henrik

On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 12:41 PM, Peng Yu <pengyu.ut at gmail.com> wrote:
> read.table terminates the program if the input file is empty. Is there
> way to let the program continue and return me a NULL instead of
> terminating the program?
>
> $ Rscript read_empty.R
>> read.table("empty_data.txt")
> Error in read.table("empty_data.txt") : no lines available in input
> Execution halted
> $ cat read_empty.R
> read.table("empty_data.txt")
> $ cat empty_data.txt; echo EOF
> EOF
>
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