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

Jinsong Zhao jszhao at yeah.net
Fri Dec 23 06:13:22 CET 2016


On 2016/12/23 11:31, Sarah Goslee wrote:
> Look at the default arguments to each, especially the quote argument.
>
> Sarah
>

Thank you very much!

The quote and fill argument are not same for the two function. only 
change quote or fill can not make read.table() work.

Best,
Jinsong

> 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



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