[R] Omitting blank lines with read.table

[kjetil brinchmann halvorsen]

On 24 Sep 2003 at 11:32, Patrick Connolly wrote:

read.table has an argument blank.lines.skip, which is true by 
default, at least in read.table. You can try to give that to 
read.delim?

Kjetil Halvorsen

> Say we have a tab delimited file called bug.txt
> 
> Part	Rep	Cage	Hb pupae
> 1	1	S	32
> 	1	M	34
> 		L	42
> 			  
> 			  
> 	2	S	36
> 		M	28
> 		L	36
> 
> read.delim("bug.txt")
> 
>   Part Rep Cage Hb.pupae
> 1    1   1    S       32
> 2   NA   1    M       34
> 3   NA  NA    L       42
> 4   NA  NA            NA
> 5   NA  NA            NA
> 6   NA   2    S       36
> 7   NA  NA    M       28
> 8   NA  NA    L       36
> >
> 
> Variations on read.table give the same result.
> 
> When I first used read.table in Splus, I liked the way it ignored rows
> that were empty (at least when using sep = "\t").  A line was
> considerend empty if it contained only tab characters, so the rows of
> NAs or ""s are omitted, so that rows 4 and 5 above would be deleted.
> 
> R's read.table differs in this respect (and a number of really neat
> ones).  I probably know enough Perl to be able to write a short script
> that could delete such lines, and it's not difficult to remove the
> rows from the dataframe afterwards; but maybe there's something simple
> I've misunderstood in the use of R's read.table.
> 
> I can't use na.omit since the other NAs in the data can be dealt with
> so I don't want them removed.  Other suggestions welcome.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> -- 
> Patrick Connolly
> HortResearch
> Mt Albert
> Auckland
> New Zealand 
> Ph: +64-9 815 4200 x 7188
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