[R] Odp: read.table: fill=T for header?

[Petr PIKAL]

Hi

If I understand correctly you maybe could read a file without header, 
discard last column, read first line of a file and put it as column names.

read.delim(textConnection(infile), header=F, skip=1)
scan(textConnection(infile), nlines=1, sep="\t", what=c("",""))

Regards
Petr


r-help-bounces at r-project.org napsal dne 27.04.2011 14:15:33:

> 
>    Dear ExpeRts,t
> 
> I am trying to read tab delimted data produced by somewhat brain dead
> software that seems to think it's a good idea to have an extra tab
> character after the last column - except for the header line. As
> explained in the help page, read.delim now assumes that the first
> column contains the row.names (which is not even wrong) but now and all
> col.names get shiftet by one column. Example:
> 
> infile <- 'sample\tx1\n1\tA\t\n2\tB\t\n3\tA\t'
> read.delim(textConnection(infile))
>     sample x1
>   1      A NA
>   2      B NA
>   3      A NA
> 
> So I set row.names to NULL because the man page said "Using
> ‘row.names = NULL’ forces row numbering.". Now the row.names really
> are numbered automatically but I get a "bonus column":
> 
> read.delim(textConnection(infile), row.names=NULL)
>     row.names sample x1
>   1         1      A NA
>   2         2      B NA
>   3         3      A NA
> 
> Hm - not what I want. I am also a bit puzzeled why the extra column is
> introduced instead of just using the first col.name. At the moment I
> deal with it by fixing the col.names and dumping the extra column:
> 
> dat <- read.delim(textConnection(infile), row.names=NULL)
> colnames(dat) <- colnames(dat)[-1]
> dat <- dat[-ncol(dat)]
> dat
>     sample x1
>   1      1  A
>   2      2  B
>   3      3  A
> 
> I worked my way through ?read.delim but could not find an option to
> deal with these (flawed) files directly. As the opposite situation
> (i.e. more col.names than data) can be fixed with fill=T I was hoping
> something like fill.header=T or fill='header' may exist.  Did I just
> not find it or does it not exist?  And if it doesn't - does anyone
> else think it would be a nice item for the wishlist?
> 
> cu
>    Philipp
> 
> 
> -- 
> Dr. Philipp Pagel
> Lehrstuhl für Genomorientierte Bioinformatik
> Technische Universität München
> Wissenschaftszentrum Weihenstephan
> Maximus-von-Imhof-Forum 3
> 85354 Freising, Germany
> http://webclu.bio.wzw.tum.de/~pagel/
> 
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