Importing Large Dataset into Excel

Also, is there an easier way to import data from R into Excel
using a single line of R code?

The problem is often a misspecification of the comment.char argument.
For read.table(), it defaults to '#'. This means that everywhere you
have a '#' char in your Excel sheet, the rest of the line is ignored.
This results in a different number of items per line.

You should better use read.csv() which provides better default arguments
for your particular problem.
Best,

Philippe Grosjean


jim holtman wrote:

?count.fields

count.fields will tell you how many items are in each line.  As you
said, they should all be the same, but this will confirm it.

field.count <- count.fields("newborn edit.csv", sep=",")
table(field.count)  # determine count of the fields on a line

On Dec 11, 2007 7:15 PM, Wayne Aldo Gavioli <wgavioli at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:

Hello all,


I seem to be having a problem importing a data set from Excel into R.  I'm using
the "read.table" command to import the data with the following line of code:

newborn<-read.table("newborn edit.csv", header=T, sep=",")

where "newborn edit.csv" is the name of the file.  Unfortunately, I'm getting
back the following error message:


"Error in scan(file,, what, nmax, sep, dc, quote, skip, nlines, na.string, :
line 528 did not have 44 elements"


As far as I can tell, line 528 of the spreadsheet table does have the same
number of elements as the other rows - by chance can this error message mean
anything else?  Also, is there an easier way to import data from R into Excel
using a single line of R code?