reading in data problems
On Fri, 11 Mar 2005, Upasna Sharma wrote:
Hi I have a dataset (.txt file and .dat file) in which the length of one record is 144. There is no header in the .txt or .dat file itself. When I read this file using the read.table command, and want to drop some coloumns by setting the argument colClasses to "NULL" for the columns that I want to drop, it does not work, because the entire record of the length 144 is being treated as one column only, of the type 'character'. I tried using read.fwf instead of read.table, but that doesn't seem to work either.
You should use read.fwf(). You didn't say what the problem was, so we have to guess: did you try to use NULL to skip columns rather than using negative field widths as the help page says? -thomas Thomas Lumley Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics tlumley at u.washington.edu University of Washington, Seattle