[R] Adding a header after the file is written

[Ista Zahn]

Hi Steve,
I think you just need to set col.names = FALSE (instead of col.names
=NULL) on subsequent writes.

-Ista

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 5:19 PM, steven mosher <moshersteven at gmail.com> wrote:
> The situation arises where I open a file to write a data.frame to it. with
> write.table.
>
> multiple lines are written to the file and the file is kept in Append=TRUE
> mode.
>
> If one sets the col.names to the names of the variables being written,  you
> have output
> that looks like this...
>
> name1 name2  name3.....
>
>  x          x         x
>  x          x         x
>  x          x         x
> name1  name2  name 3
>  x          x         x
>  x          x         x
>  x          x         x
>
> And so forth as each time write is called, the col.names are written.
>
> Setting col.names=NULL obviously removes them.
>
> I thought a simple solution would be to check for the file existence first
> and on the first write, include the col.names. with append=T.
> on subsequent writes, col.names would be set to NULL.
> that didnt work and threw warnings.
>
> Is there anyway to do this. basically open a file for writing, with
> append=TRUE and only write the col.names once
> at the first write. or am I stuck and forced to write the whole file without
> the col.names and then read back in and rewrite
> with col.names="the cols names I want"
>
>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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-- 
Ista Zahn
Graduate student
University of Rochester
Department of Clinical and Social Psychology
http://yourpsyche.org