Jim, Duncan and David,

Thanks to you guys I manage to solve the problem and I have learnt a lot.
Best regards

J

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 4:55 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch@stats.uwo.ca> wrote:

> On 04/03/2010 11:40 PM, David Winsemius wrote:
>
>> On Mar 4, 2010, at 10:58 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>>
>> On 04/03/2010 10:32 PM, David Winsemius wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Mar 4, 2010, at 9:47 PM, jonas garcia wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> When I opened the file with a hex-editor, the problematic  character
>>>>>  turned out to be “1a”
>>>>> I am attaching a sample DAT file with 3 lines (the second line is   the
>>>>> one with the undesirable character).
>>>>>
>>>>> The furthest I could get was through readBin:
>>>>>
>>>>> tmp<- readBin("new.dat", what = "raw", n=100000000)
>>>>>>
>>>>>  [1] 30 32 3a 33 35 3a 33 32 2c 20 34 34 30 33 2c 20 33 37 2e 31  31
>>>>>  34 2c 2d 32 30 2e 38 33 36 2c 31
>>>>> [33] 35 35 2e 39 2c 30 30 2e 37 36 2c 31 31 35 36 0d 0a 30 32 3a  33
>>>>>  35 3a 33 35 2c 20 34 34 33 32 2c
>>>>> [65] 20 33 37 2e 31 31 34 2c 2d 32 30 2e 38 33 36 2c 31 35 35 2e  38
>>>>>  2c 1a 30 2e 38 31 2c 31 31 35 37
>>>>> [97] 0d 0a 30 32 3a 33 35 3a 33 39 2c 20 34 34 36 37 2c 20 33 37  2e
>>>>>  31 31 34 2c 2d 32 30 2e 38 33 36
>>>>> [129] 2c 31 35 35 2e 38 2c 30 30 2e 38 31 2c 31 31 35 38
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> tmp[87]
>>>>>>
>>>>> [1] 1a
>>>>>
>>>> I got a different "interpretation" of that character when I let R  look
>>>>  at it. And I cannot figure out why \032 should be causing  problems??? :
>>>>
>>> Hex 1a and octal 032 both correspond to Ctrl-Z, which is the MSDOS  EOF
>>> marker.  I forget whether R's text reading routines pay  attention to that,
>>> or whether it's the C runtime, but it makes sense  that it would cause
>>> problems on Windows.
>>>
>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>
>>
>> Thanks. I was interpreting \032 as decimal, so couldn't figure out why  it
>> should equal 0x1A. You've explained the basis (or base) of my  confusion.
>>
>
> By the way, here's one way to remove the bad char.  Read it using readBin
> as above, then
>
> tmp <- tmp[tmp != 0x1a]
>
> to remove the bad chars, or
>
> tmp[tmp == 0x1a] <- charToRaw(" ")
>
> to replace them with spaces.  Then write the tmp vector out to a file with
> writeBin.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>

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