[R] Skipping lines and incomplete rows

[Rui Barradas]

Hello,

Try the following.

head <- readLines("test.txt", n=4)[4]
dat <- read.table("test.txt", skip=5)
names(dat) <- unlist(strsplit(head, " "))
dat


hope this helps,

Rui Barradas

Em 09-07-2012 11:23, vioravis escreveu:
> 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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