[R] Strange problem with reading a pipe delimited file

[Brian Feeny]

Duncan,

I believe I follow you now, I have done like so with expected results:

ncol <- max(count.fields("paths.txt", sep = "|"))
test <- read.delim("paths.txt", sep="|", quote=NULL, header=F, colClasses="character", fill=TRUE, col.names = paste("V", seq_len(ncol), sep = ""))


Thank you for your help

Brian


On Nov 17, 2012, at 4:34 PM, Brian Feeny wrote:

> 
> On Nov 17, 2012, at 4:27 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>>> 
>> 
>> I would suggest reading the help file: read.delim only looks at the first 5 lines to determine the number of columns if you don't specify the colClasses.
>> 
>> Duncan Murdoch
>> 
> 
> Duncan, 
> 
> I have tried to pass colClasses but R complains:
> 
> test <- read.delim("mypaths4.txt", sep="|", quote=NULL, header=F, colClasses=c("character","character","character","character","character","character","character","character","character","character"), fill=TRUE)
> Warning message:
> In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote,  :
>  cols = 9 != length(data) = 10
> 
> 
> once again this is with data:
> 
> A|B|C|D
> A|B|C|D|E|F
> A|B|C|D|E
> A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I
> A|B|C|D
> A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J
> 
> Any idea?
> 
> Brian
> 
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.