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

[Peng Yu]

Please reread my original post. You run it in a shell. I run it in a script.

On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Henrik Bengtsson <hb at stat.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 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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>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>