strange behavior when reading csv - line wraps

You need to supply the actual input line so we can see what is 
happening.  Are you sure you do not have unbalanced quotes in your 
input (try quote='') or do you have comment characters ("#") in your 
input?

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Martin Tomko <martin.tomko at geo.uzh.ch 
<mailto:martin.tomko at geo.uzh.ch>> wrote:

    Dear All,
    I am observing a strange behavior and searching the archives and
    help pages didn't help much.
    I have a csv with a variable number of fields in each line.

    I use
    dataPoints <- read.csv(inputFile, head=FALSE, sep=";",fill =TRUE);

    to read it in, and it works. But - some lines are long and 'wrap',
    or split and continue on the next line. So when I check the dim of
    the frame, they are not correct and I can see when I do a printout
    that the lines is split into two in the frame. I checked the input
    file and all is good.

    an example of the input is:
    37;2175168475;13;8.522729;47.19537;16366682 at N00;30;sculpture;bird;tourism;animal;statue;canon;eos;rebel;schweiz;switzerland;eagle;swiss;adler;skulptur;zug;1750;28;tamron;f28;canton;tourismus;vogel;baar;kanton;xti;tamron1750;1750mm;tamron1750mm;400d;rabbitriotnet;

    where the last values occurs on the next line in the data frame.

    It does not have to be the last value, as in the follwong example,
    the word "kempten" starts the next line:
    39;167757703;12;10.309295;47.724545;21903142 at N00;36;white;building;tower;clock;clouds;germany;bayern;deutschland;bavaria;europa;europe;eagle;adler;eu;wolke;dome;townhall;rathaus;turm;weiss;allemagne;europeanunion;bundesrepublik;gebaeude;glocke;brd;allgau;kuppel;europ;kempten;niemcy;europo;federalrepublic;europaischeunion;europaeischeunion;germanio;

    What could be the reason?

    I ws thinking about solving the issue by using a different
    separator, that I would use for the first 7 fields and
    concatenating all of the remaining values into a single stirng
    value, but could not figure out how to do such a substitution in
    R. Unfortunately, on my system I cannot specify a range for sed...

    Thanks for any help/pointers
    Martin