read.table

On 25-Feb-05 Sean Davis wrote:

I have a commonly recurring problem and wondered if folks
would share tips.  I routinely get tab-delimited text files
that I need to read in.
  In very many cases, I get:

 > a <- read.table('junk.txt.txt',header=T,skip=10,sep="\t")

Error in scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = quote,
dec = dec,  :
      line 67 did not have 88 elements

I am typically able to go through the file and find a single
quote or something like that causing the problem, but with a
recent set of files, I haven't been able to find such an issue.
What can I do to get around this problem?  I can use perl, also....

Hi Sean,

This is only a shot in the dark, but your description has reminded
me of similar messes in files which have been exported from Excel.

What I have often done in such cases, to check (e.g.) the numbers
of fields in records (using 'awk' on Linux) is on the following
lines:

  cat filename | awk 'BEGIN{FS="\t"} {print NF}' | unique