[R] read.table() vs read.delim() any difference??

[peter dalgaard]

On May 4, 2012, at 08:16 , Rameswara Sashi Kiran Challa wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have a tab seperated file with 206 rows and 30 columns.
> 
> I read in the file into R using read.table() function. I checked the dim()
> of the data frame created in R, it had only 103 rows (exactly half), 30
> columns. Then I tried reading in the file using read.delim() function and
> this time the dim() showed to be 206 rows, 30 columns as expected.
> Reading the read.table() R-help documentation, I came across count.fields()
> function. On using that on the tab seperated file, I got to learn that the
> header line alone has 30 fields and rest of the rows have 9 fields. I am
> now just wondering why read.delim() function was able to read in the file
> correctly and read.table() wasn't able to read the file completely ?
> 
> Could anyone please throw some light on this?

This can't be answered in abstractum. However, all that read.delim does is to call read.table with a specific set of arguments, so you should be able to get the right result from 

read.table(......., header = TRUE, sep = "\t", quote = "\"", dec = ".", 
    fill = TRUE, comment.char = "")

So check that it works. If you are curious as to what is causing the difference, just knock out the arguments one by one. 


> 
> Thanks for your valuable time,
> 
> Regards
> Sashi
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
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