[R] eliminating control characters from formatted data files

[David Epstein]

I have a few hundred files of formatted data. Unfortunately most of them end
with a spurious CONTROL-Z. I want to rewrite the files without the spurious
character. Here's what I've come up with so far, but my code is unsafe
because it assumes without justification that the last row of df contains a
control character (and some NAs to fill up the record).

options(warn=-1) #turn off irritating warning from read.table()
df<-read.table(file=filename)
df.new<-df[1:nrow(df)-1,]
write.table(df.new,file=filename.new, quote=F)

Before defining df.new, I want to check that the last line really does
contain a control character. I've tried various methods, but none of them
work.

I have been wondering if I should use a function (scan?) that reads in the
file line by line and checks each line for control characters, but I don't
know how to do this either.

Thanks for any help
David
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