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detecting blanks in read.table()

3 messages · Laura Forsberg, Thomas Lumley, Peter Dalgaard

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Hi everyone,

I am trying to read in a tab delimited data file to R that has outliers
marked by blank spaces.  I would like to be able to tag those as "NA"
when the data is read in.  I cannot figure out how to do this using the
read.table() options.  Everything I have tried either puts all the NA on
the end of the row when there are missing values instead of on their
appropiate columns or won't read the data in at all.

Thanks much,

Laura

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On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Laura Forsberg wrote:

            
This seems to work
a  b  c d
1  1 NA  2 3
2  4  5 NA 6
3 NA  7  8 9

where the file is
a	b	c	d
1	 	2	3
4	5	 	6
 	7	8	9

ie with tabs replaced by \t
a\tb\tc\td
1\t \t2\t3
4\t5\t \t6
\t7\t8\t9


	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Asst. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle

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Laura Forsberg <toad at alvie-mail.lanl.gov> writes:
Blank or empty? Using read.delim() or read.table(...,sep="\t") should
at least get the columns right. You might need na.strings=" " to
prevent it from interpreting the entire column as a factor.