[R] Strange problem with reading a pipe delimited file

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 12-11-17 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?

Sure, it's warning you that your file looks like it has 9 columns, but 
you said it has 10, and it will not have generated good column names 
(but it will have read the file properly).

If you give it 10 names (e.g. using col.names=LETTERS[1:10]) it will be 
happy.

Duncan Murdoch