[R] Skipping lines and incomplete rows

vioravis vioravis at gmail.com
Mon Jul 9 12:23:57 CEST 2012


I have a text file that has semi-colon separated values. The table is nearly
10,000 by 585. The files looks as follows:

*******************************************
First line: Skip this line
Second line: skip this line
Third line: skip this line
variable1 Variable2 Variable3 Variable4
                   Unit1         Unit2         Unit3
10              0.1               0.01           0.001
20              0.2               0.02           0.002 
30              0.3               0.03           0.003
40              0.4               0.04           0.004
*******************************************

The first three lines need to be skipped. Moreover, line 5 doesn't have
units for all the variables and hence, has to be skipped as well.
Effectively, I want the following to be read to a dataframe skipping rows 1,
2, 3 and 5.

*******************************************
variable1 Variable2 Variable3 Variable4
10              0.1               0.01           0.001
20              0.2               0.02           0.002 
30              0.3               0.03           0.003
40              0.4               0.04           0.004
*******************************************

I tried using read.table with skip for line 1-3 as follows 

inputData <- read.table("test.txt",sep = ";",skip = 3)

but the line 4 is creating problem with the following error:

Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings, 
: 
  line 3 did not have 585 elements

Can someone help me with this?

Thank you.

Ravi

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