[R] read.table: how to ignore errors?

Sam Steingold sds at gnu.org
Tue Jan 24 21:45:04 CET 2012


I get this error from read.table():
Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  : 
  line 234 did not have 8 elements
The error is genuine (an extra field separator between 1st and 2nd element).

1. is there a way to see this bad line 234 from R without diving into the file?

2. is there a way to ignore the bad lines and get the data from the good
lines only (I do want to see the bad lines, but I don't want to stop all
work until some issue which causes 1% of data is resolved).

thanks.

Oh, yeah, a reproducible example:

read.csv from
=====
a,b
1,2
3,4
5,,6
7,8
=====
I want to be able to extract the data frame
  a b
1 1 1
2 3 4
3 7 8

and a list of strings of length 1 containing "5,,6".

-- 
Sam Steingold (http://sds.podval.org/) on Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric) X 11.0.11004000
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