[R] extracting information from txt file

chuck.01 CharlieTheBrown77 at gmail.com
Wed Oct 31 17:46:37 CET 2012


Hello,

Here is a link to some data:
http://www.epa.gov/emap/html/data/surfwatr/data/mastreams/9396/wchem/chmval.txt

I am trying to read this in, and want to use: 
chmval <-
read.table("http://www.epa.gov/emap/html/data/surfwatr/data/mastreams/9396/wchem/chmval.txt",
sep=",", skip= 84, header=T)

the # 84, for 84 lines skipped needs to be derived from the 5th line of the
txt file  
# Header Records:  85 

so, I need that # (-1) for input into the read.table statement above

I've tried grep but that didn't work: 
 (for this I downloaded the txt file and manually removed that hash mark!)

grep("Header Records:", read.table("chmval.txt", header=T))
Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings, 
: 
  line 1 did not have 5 elements

Any ideas?
Can I just extract the 5th line?




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