[R] read.xls can't read some .xls files

[Carl Witthoft]

First off, pardon the simple question, but is the XXX.xls file in your 
current working directory?  The error message might suggest that R (or 
more precisely, the perl script) never saw the input file.

Have you been able to load any other Excel file into R?



My only other guess is that for some reason your /tmp directory has bad 
permissions, so the /tmp/Rtmp....  directory couldn't be created.

Carl


//quote:
From: shrey sinha <shreysinha1_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:37:42 +0530


Hi,

I am having problem with the read.xls function. I am trying to read a 
.xls file but
it's giving me error.

 > read.xls("XXX.xls")

Error parsing file 'XXX.xls'.
Error in xls2sep(xls, sheet, verbose = verbose, ..., method = method, : 
   Intermediate file '/tmp/Rtmp5QQjSI/file1665315c.csv' missing! In 
addition: Warning message:
running command '"/usr/bin/perl"
"/home/t227/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/2.12/gdata/perl/xls2csv.pl" 
"XXX.xls" "/tmp/Rtmp5QQjSI/file1665315c.csv" "1"' had status 9 Error in 
file.exists(tfn) : invalid 'file' argument

And the file which I am trying to read opens perfectly in Open Office.