[R] Understanding read.csv error message

[peter dalgaard]

What Don said, and also notice that the error is not about anything having value 0, it is about replacing something with something of _length_ 0. It is not obvious where that happens, sometimes a traceback() can give a clue, but probably Don is right that the issue is that there is something not quite CSV in the file. 

One further idea is to read using colClasses="character" and see if that actually gives you 6 columns and then afterwards try and convert each column to the appropriate type.

-pd

> On 18 Aug 2018, at 00:08 , Rich Shepard <rshepard using appl-ecosys.com> wrote:
> 
>  I have a data file, 'precip_projected.csv,' that starts like this:
> 
> name,easting,northing,elev,sampdate,prcp
> Headworks Portland Water,2370575.38427211,199337.634652112,228,2005-01-01,0.59
> Headworks Portland Water,2370575.38427211,199337.634652112,228,2005-01-02,0.08
> Headworks Portland Water,2370575.38427211,199337.634652112,228,2005-01-03,0.1
> Headworks Portland Water,2370575.38427211,199337.634652112,228,2005-01-04,0
> Headworks Portland Water,2370575.38427211,199337.634652112,228,2005-01-05,0
> Headworks Portland Water,2370575.38427211,199337.634652112,228,2005-01-06,0.02
> Headworks Portland Water,2370575.38427211,199337.634652112,228,2005-01-07,0.05
> Headworks Portland Water,2370575.38427211,199337.634652112,228,2005-01-08,0.1
> Headworks Portland Water,2370575.38427211,199337.634652112,228,2005-01-09,0
> Headworks Portland Water,2370575.38427211,199337.634652112,228,2005-01-10,0.02
> 
>  There are a bunch of NAs in the data file.
> 
>  The command to read it produces an error:
> 
> rainfall <- read.csv('../data/precipitation/precip_projected.csv', header = T, sep = ',', as.is = T)
> 
> Error in `$<-.data.frame`(`*tmp*`, date, value = numeric(0)) :
>  replacement has 0 rows, data has 113569
> 
>  Is the error generated by finding a date that looks like the number zero
> or by a prcp value of zero?
> 
>  BTW, I get the same error if I specify stringsAsFactors = F.
> 
> TIA,
> 
> Rich
> 
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-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
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