[R] Importing Large Dataset into Excel

[Peter Dalgaard]

Philippe Grosjean wrote:
> The problem is often a misspecification of the comment.char argument. 
> For read.table(), it defaults to '#'. This means that everywhere you 
> have a '#' char in your Excel sheet, the rest of the line is ignored. 
> This results in a different number of items per line.
>
> You should better use read.csv() which provides better default arguments 
> for your particular problem.
> Best,
>
>   
Or read.delim/read.delim2, which should be even better at TAB-separated
files.

In general, be very suspicious of read.table() with such files, not only
because of the '#' but also because it expects columns separated by
_arbitrary_ amounts of whitespace. I.e., n TABs  counts as one, so empty
fields are skipped over.

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   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
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