Skipping lines and incomplete rows

Thanks a lot for the guidance. I have another text file with a time stamp and
an empty column as given below:

********************************************************************************************
First line: Skip this line
Second line: skip this line
Third line: skip this line
variable1 Variable2 Variable3 Variable4
                 Unit1     Unit2     Unit3
11/1/2004 0:00  0.1                 0.001
11/1/2004 0:10  0.2                 0.002
11/1/2004 0:20  0.3                 0.003
11/1/2004 0:30  0.4                 0.004
********************************************************************************************

This is space separated text file. When I use the following code:

head <- readLines("testInput.txt", n=4)[4]
dat <- read.table("testInput.txt", skip=5, sep="",fill = TRUE,
stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
names(dat) <- unlist(strsplit(head, " "))

I get the following output:

str(dat)

'data.frame':   4 obs. of  4 variables:
  $ variable1: chr  "11/1/2004" "11/1/2004" "11/1/2004" "11/1/2004"
  $ Variable2: chr  "0:00" "0:10" "0:20" "0:30"
  $ Variable3: num  0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4
  $ Variable4: num  0.001 0.002 0.003 0.004

Variable1's date and time gets split as Variable1 and Variable2 whereas they
should both be part of Variable1.

Also, the empty column is missing from the data frame.

Is there a way to handle these two cases?

Thank you.

Ravi


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