[R] Reading a tab delimted file of varying length using read.table

[Uwe Ligges]

This is not a tab delimited file (as you apparently assume given the 
code), but a fixed width format, hence I'd try:

url <- "http://data.princeton.edu/wws509/datasets/divorce.dat"
widths <- c(9, 13, 10, 8, 10, 6)
f5 <- read.fwf(url, widths = widths, skip = 1, strip.white = TRUE)

names(f5) <- as.character(unlist(read.fwf(url, widths = widths, 
strip.white=TRUE, n=1)))

Not sure why reading it simply with header=TRUE des not work, but no 
time to investiagte this now.

Best,
Uwe Ligges



On 17.01.2016 16:31, Pradeep Bisht wrote:
> Hello Experts  ,
>
> Being a SAS developer I am finding it difficult to perform some of data
> cleaning in R that are quite easy to perform in SAS .
>
> I have been trying to read a .dat file and after a lot of attempts have
> failed to find a solution . Maybe R doesn't have the functionality right
> now or I am not looking in the right place . Here is my code .
>
> f5=read.table("http://data.princeton.edu/wws509/datasets/divorce.dat
> <http://www.linkedin.com/redir/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdata%2Eprinceton%2Eedu%2Fwws509%2Fdatasets%2Fdivorce%2Edat&urlhash=GVbR&_t=tracking_anet>
> ",
> header=T,
> sep="\t",
> colClasses = c("numeric", "character", "character","character", "double",
> "character" ) )
> The error i get i
> ​s​
> this .
> Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,
> :
> scan() expected 'a real', got '912-15yearsNoNo10.546No'
>
> Also does read.table always calls scan in background to do its job . If so
> why use read.table in first place .
>
> Pradeep​
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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