[R] missing values in document

Jim Lemon jim at bitwrit.com.au
Wed Apr 30 13:32:46 CEST 2008


Monna Nygård wrote:
> No matter how I´ve tried o find a solution for this simple question, I can´t. Sorry for bothering with such a matter.
>  
> I have an excel-files with some empty cells=missing values. How do I tell R that these should be NA´s? 
>  
> 
>> TRFLP1 <-(read.table(file="S://SEDIM//Kokeilu//TRFLP1.txt",col.names= c("Dye_Sample Peak", "Sample_File_Name", "Size", "Height", "Area_in_Point", "Area_in_BP", "Data_Point", "Begin_Point", "Begin_BP", "End_Point", "End_BP", "Width_in_Point", "Width_in_BP", "1" ), header=F , dec = ",", )Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  :   line 1743 did not have 14 elements
> 
>  
> I believe the error occurs becouse line 1743 has an empty cell. How do I read in the file without first checking for missing values and changing them to NAs myself?
>  
Hi Monna,
read.table has an argument "na.strings" that allows you to specify what 
will be read as a missing value. Setting this to na.strings="" should 
get you there.

Jim



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