[R] different between read.table and read.delim

[Sarah Goslee]

Look at the default arguments to each, especially the quote argument.

Sarah

On Thu, Dec 22, 2016 at 10:24 PM, Jinsong Zhao <jszhao at yeah.net> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I have a data set file, called "ecotox.rep", which is a delimited file
> separated with "|".
>
> When I tried to read the file with the following command,
>
>> df <- read.table("ecotox.rep", sep = "|", header = TRUE,
>> stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
>
> I got the error messages:
>
> Error in scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = quote, dec = dec,
> :
>   line 113 did not have 87 elements
>
> However, when I read the file with the following command,
>
>> df <- read.delim("ecotox.rep", sep = "|", header = TRUE,
>> stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
>
> I got a correct output.
>
> If I understand correctly, read.delim() is just wrapped from read.table(),
> why read.delim() works, but read.table() doesn't.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Best,
> Jinsong
>