[R] problem with read.table

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 3 Feb 2004 ryszard.czerminski at pharma.novartis.com wrote:

> Any ideas why read.table complains about not correct number of elements in 
> line
> while readLine/strsplit indicate that all lines have the same number of 
> elements ?

That is what count.fields is for.  Setting fill=TRUE in read.table can 
help detection, too.

One guess is that you have a comment character on that line, but one 
thing you did not show us is the appropriate lines of the file.

> > tbl <- read.table('tmp', header = T, sep = '\t')
> Error in scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = quote, dec = 
> dec,  : 
>         line 32 did not have 27 elements
> > lines <- readLines('tmp')
> > v <- 1:length(lines)
> > i <- 0; for (line in lines) { i <- i + 1; v[i] <- length(strsplit(line, 
> '\t')[[1]]) }
> > v
>  [1] 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 
> 27 27
> [26] 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 
> 27 27
> [51] 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27 27
> > sum((v - v[1])^2)
> [1] 0
> > length(strsplit(lines[32], '\t')[[1]])
> [1] 27
> 
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
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