[R-sig-DB] RODBC: Problem with reading 1st line of data

[Wolfgang Raffelsberger]

Dear List,

when reading MS Excel files in R using package RODBC I encountered the 
problem of not being able to read the first line of data from the 
original Excel sheets :
This problem arises when the data start directly, i.e. when the original 
sheets don’t contain header-names and the 1^st line starts immediately 
with the (numeric) values I want to read.
Any text/string component of original first line appears as 
column-name(s) (in the case of strings) while numeric components are 
replaced by F2, F3 etc.
Then the 2nd line from my input appears then as 1st line of data in the 
resulting R-object and, no surprise, the total number of lines is 1 too 
few ...

I read the data as :
>  library(RODBC)
>  channel1 <- odbcConnectExcel("myFile.xls")
>  sheet1 <- sqlQuery(channel1, "SELECT * FROM [Cell measures (1)$]") # I 
use sqlQuery() instead of sqlFetch() because of the name of the sheet I 
want to extract ("Cell measures (1)")

>  sheet1[1:3,1:5]
D - 5(fld 10) F2 F3 F4 F5
1 D - 5(fld 11) 162 182.110 0.042 184.695
2 D - 5(fld 12) 163 198.154 0.086 201.932
3 D - 5(fld 13) 164 182.403 0.034 182.816

However, the 1st line in the original reads as :
D - 5(fld 10) 161 182.929 0.045 188.819

Do you have an idea how to formulate the query that I actually can read 
the 1st line of data ?
Is there some argument equivalent to the "col.names=FALSE" in 
read.table() ?
Or is there a way to circumvent the problem by adding an additional line 
using the SQL command "INSERT" (so that the real data would start in 
line 2) ?

Since the original idea consist in generating an automatic protocol for 
processing data available as several Excel sheets from a custom 
application and since these sheets are packed until the last possible 
line (#65536) manually inserting an additional line isn’t a suitable 
option either.

>  sessionInfo()
R version 2.4.0 (2006-10-03)
i386-pc-mingw32

locale:
LC_COLLATE=French_France.1252;LC_CTYPE=French_France.1252;LC_MONETARY=French_France.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=French_France.1252 


attached base packages:
[1] "methods" "stats" "graphics" "grDevices" "utils" "datasets" "tcltk" 
"base"
other attached packages:
RODBC svIO R2HTML svMisc svSocket svIDE
"1.1-7" "0.9-5" "1.58" "0.9-5" "0.9-5" "0.9-5"


Thank's in advance,
Wolfgang




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Wolfgang Raffelsberger, PhD
Laboratoire de BioInformatique et Génomique Intégratives
IGBMC
1 rue Laurent Fries, 67404 Illkirch Strasbourg, France
Tel (+33) 388 65 3314 Fax (+33) 388 65 3276
wolfgang.raffelsberger using igbmc.u-strasbg.fr