[R] Problems reading tab-delim files using read.table and read.delim

[mails]

Hello,

I used read.xlsx to read in Excel files but for large files it turned out to
be not very efficient.
For that reason I use a programme which writes each sheet in an Excel file
into tab-delim txt files.
After that I tried using read.table and read.delim to read in those txt
files. Unfortunately, the results
are not as expected. To show you what I mean I created a tiny Excel sheet
with some rows and columns and
read it in using read.xlsx. I also used my script to write that sheet to a
tab-delim txt file and read that one it with
read.table and read.delim. Here is the R output:



> (test <- read.table(Sheet1.txt, header=TRUE, sep="\t"))
Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings, 
: 
  line 1 did not have 5 elements

> (test <- read.delim(Sheet1.txt, header=TRUE, sep="\t"))
     c1 c2 c3  X
123 213 NA NA NA
234 asd NA NA NA

> (test <- read.xlsx(file.path(data), "Sheet1"))
   c1   c2  c3       NA.     NA..1     NA..2
1 123 <NA> 213                <NA>      <NA>
2 234  asd  NA      <NA>                    


The last output is what I would expect the file to be read in. Columns 4 to
6 do not have any header rows. in R1C4 I added some white spaces as well as
into R2C5 and R2C6 which a read in correctly by the read.xlsx function.

read.table and read.delim seem not to be able to handle such files. Is there
any workaround for that?


Cheers

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