extracting information from txt file

Hello,

Here is a link to some data:
http://www.epa.gov/emap/html/data/surfwatr/data/mastreams/9396/wchem/chmval.txt

I am trying to read this in, and want to use:
chmval <-
read.table("http://www.epa.gov/emap/html/data/surfwatr/data/mastreams/9396/wchem/chmval.txt",
sep=",", skip= 84, header=T)

the # 84, for 84 lines skipped needs to be derived from the 5th line of the
txt file
# Header Records:  85

so, I need that # (-1) for input into the read.table statement above

I've tried grep but that didn't work:
  (for this I downloaded the txt file and manually removed that hash mark!)

grep("Header Records:", read.table("chmval.txt", header=T))
Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,
:
   line 1 did not have 5 elements

Any ideas?
Can I just extract the 5th line?




--
View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/extracting-information-from-txt-file-tp4648033.html
Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.