Adding argument 'flush' to read.table() too...
This will not work if the table has no header. scan() requires you to specify the fields, but read.table does not and so you cannot know which fields might be surplus. Similarly, the header line might have surplus fields ....
On Sun, 18 Aug 2002, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
What about adding the argument 'flush=FALSE' to read.table() for the option
to ignore trailing elements on each row? This feature already exists in
scan(), which is called internally by read.table():
flush: logical: if `TRUE', `scan' will flush to the end of the line
after reading the last of the fields requested. This allows
putting comments after the last field, but precludes putting
more that one record on a line.
Looking at the code for read.table(), adding argument 'flush=FALSE' and then
call scan(..., flush=flush) internally seems to be fully backward
compatible. However, I do not know about the S-Plus compatibility.
Comment: I found the need for this when trying to read TAB delimited data
files from an external software that (for unknown reasons) adds several
trailing TAB's to the last 5-10 rows.
Regards,
Henrik Bengtsson
Dept. of Mathematical Statistics @ Centre for Mathematical Sciences
Lund Institute of Technology/Lund University, Sweden (+2h UTC)
+46 46 2229611 (off), +46 708 909208 (cell), +46 46 2224623 (fax)
h b @ m a t h s . l t h . s e, http://www.maths.lth.se/bioinformatics/
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