[R] comments in scan

[Jarrett Byrnes]

Right, but what if it is not the first line?  For example

#data block 1
34,54,23
23,53,12
35,23,23
#data block 2
64,24,13
354,24,12
324,13,3

On Nov 27, 2006, at 4:39 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> On 11/27/2006 7:25 PM, Jarrett Byrnes wrote:
>> I had a question about scan in R.  For better code readability, I   
>> would like to have lines in the block of data to be scanned that  
>> are  commented - not just lines that have a comment at the end.   
>> For example
>> #age, weight, height
>> 33,128,65
>> 34,56,155
>> instead of having to do something like
>> 33,128,65 #age, weight, height
>> 34,56,155
>> Is this at all possible?
>
> If it's on the first line, it's easy:  just use skip=1 to skip the  
> first line.
>
> The general case
>
> #age, weight, height
> 33,128,65
> # and now for something completely different
> 34,56,155
>
> probably needs something like this:
>
>  scan("foo", what=list(0,0,0), comment.char="#", sep=",",  
> multi.line=T)
>
> i.e. you need to tell it how many objects are in a record, and  
> allow records to span multiple lines.  Watch out for typos in the  
> file that put different numbers of entries on each line, because  
> scan() won't complain about it.
>
> Duncan Murdoch