Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0304020800510.12025-100000@gannet.stats>
Date: 2003-04-02T07:01:16Z
From: Brian Ripley
Subject: read.table
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0304020734330.11976-100000@gannet.stats>
On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Apr 2003 Oldradio69 at aol.com wrote:
>
> > I am using read.table() to read in ASCII data into a data
> > frame. The file has multiple columns that are not the
> > same length. The function gives me errors, or I get 'NA'
> > characters in the blank fields. I want to read these values
> > in to, e.g., perform a two-sample t-test.
>
> You can't use read.table. It is designed to read a data frame where by
> definition the columns are the same length.
>
> What you can do is to use scan and remove the NAs as in
>
> tmp <- lapply(scan("foo.txt", list(0, 0)), function(x) x[!is.na(x)])
>
> which will give you a list of two numeric vectors.
>
Sorry, I omitted fill=TRUE from the scan call.
--
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