read.table error upon package installation (PR#8230)
What is the R error here? The default delimiter in read.table is not \t but whitespace, so the first example has 2 and 3 rows (fine for header=T) and the second has 2 and 4 rows.
On Fri, 21 Oct 2005 Robert.McGehee at geodecapital.com wrote:
Upon upgrading to R 2.2.0 on my Windows box, I found that one of my packages no longer compiled, giving this error: Error in read.table(zfile, header =3D TRUE) : more columns than column names Execution halted After removing every line of code from my package and still not being able to compile it, I found the error to be related to a .txt file in my data directory. I reduced my data file to a very simple example which causes the error, and a nearly identical file which does not cause the problem. A file with these contents causes the error (I am using \t to indicate the usual tab delimiter). x \t y A B C \t DEF However, if I remove one of the spaces between A and B or B and C, the package compiles fine: x \t y A BC \t DEF I can only guess that there is some kind of parsing problem when there is more than one space between tab delimiters.
Looks more like a user misunderstanding of ?data.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595