help with read.table() function
On Sun, 29 Jan 2006, Marc Schwartz wrote:
I would argue against this. If this were the default, that is requiring user interaction, it would break a fair amount of code that I (and I am sure a lot of others have) where automation is critical.
I don't see how. The current default is
read.table()
Error in read.table() : argument "file" is missing, with no default so the only change is that the default might do something useful. Nor do I see the change would help, as the same people would still use a character string for 'file' and not omit the argument. (It seems very unlikely that they would read any documentation that suggested things had changed.) The same issue could be made over scan(), where the current default is useful.
A lot of the issues seem to be user errors, file permission errors, hidden extensions as is pointed out below and related issues. If there is a legitimate bug in R resulting in these issues, then let's patch that. However, I don't think that I can recall reproducible situations where a bug in R is the root cause of these problems.
Nor I. Note that file.choose does not protect you against file permission issues (actually, on a command-line Unix-alike it does nothing much useful at all):
readLines(file.choose())
Enter file name: errs.txt Error in file(con, "r") : unable to open connection In addition: Warning message: cannot open file 'errs.txt', reason 'Permission denied' but
file.show(file.choose())
says NO FILE errs.txt which is not a good idea (and I will improve). So this would really only have any effect on GUI platforms, for people who read the documentation.
Best regards, Marc Schwartz On Sun, 2006-01-29 at 12:18 -0500, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
(Moved from R-help). This comes up often enough that I'm starting to think most functions that take filename arguments should have file.choose() as the default value. Then one could do read.table() and have a dialog box pop up in Windows, or some other prompt for a filename in other platforms. Are there any obviously bad side effects from a change like this? Duncan Murdoch On 1/29/2006 11:51 AM, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
Romain Francois <francoisromain at free.fr> writes:
Le 29.01.2006 16:26, oliver wee a ?crit :
hello, I have just started using R for doing a project
in time series...
unfortunately, I am having trouble using the
read.table function for use in reading my data set.
This is what I'm getting:
I inputted:
data <-
read.table("D:/Oliver/Professional/Studies/Time Series
Analysis/spdc2693.data", header = TRUE)
I got:
Error in file(file, "r") : unable to open connection
In addition: Warning message:
cannot open file 'D:/Oliver/Professional/Studies/Time
Series Analysis/spdc2693.data', reason 'No such file
or directory'
as I am just a novice programmer, I really would
appreciate help from you guys. Is there a need to
setpath in R, like in java or something like that...
I am using the windows version btw.
I have also tried to put the file in the work
directory of R, so that I only typed
data <- read.table("spdc2693.data", header = TRUE)
Again, it won't work, with the same error message.
I would appreciate any help. thanks again.
Hi, try : read.table(file.choose(), header=TRUE) and go to your file. Also, you can look a ?setwd, ?getwd
Right. Or just file.choose() and see what the OS thinks your file is really called. The most common causes for symptoms like that are (A) The file is "spcd2693.data" (B) There's an extra extension which ever helpful Windows decided to hide, as in "spdc2693.data.txt".
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