read.table with special chars - R-help

Tue, Jan 19, 2010 12:41 AM #

Hi all,
I am just starting with R and I have come across a problem which I guess
it is easy to solve. I am reading a table with read.table function.
This table contains chars which seem to be problematic when reading them
such as "'" and "#", if I remove these characters fromt the table by
hand the problem disappears. Otherwise, the whole table is not read,
since reading stops at the problematic tuple.
I have been looking in the ?read.table manual but have not found
anything. Is there any option to make R not interpret these characters?

Thanks in advance
Marc

-----------------------------------------------------
Marc Noguera i Julian, PhD
Genomics unit / Bioinformatics
Institut de Medicina Preventiva i Personalitzada
del C?ncer (IMPPC)
B-10 Office
Carretera de Can Ruti
Cam? de les Escoles s/n
08916 Badalona, Barcelona

Jim Lemon

Tue, Jan 19, 2010 1:07 AM #

On 01/19/2010 07:41 PM, Marc Noguera wrote:

Hi Marc,
Try changing the "quote" argument to "\"" and the comment.char argument 
to "".

Jim

Marc Noguera

Tue, Jan 19, 2010 1:26 AM #

Thanks Jim,
I've tried that but still no luck. Some other suggestions?

Thanks again
Marc

Jim Lemon wrote:

-----------------------------------------------------
Marc Noguera i Julian, PhD
Genomics unit / Bioinformatics
Institut de Medicina Preventiva i Personalitzada
del C?ncer (IMPPC)
B-10 Office
Carretera de Can Ruti
Cam? de les Escoles s/n
08916 Badalona, Barcelona

Jim Lemon

Tue, Jan 19, 2010 1:37 AM #

On 01/19/2010 08:26 PM, Marc Noguera wrote:

The comment.char change should have worked, as others have reported that 
it did. The single quote problem came up a few weeks ago and the answer 
then was to remove the single quotes. Perhaps these are more difficult 
to ignore than comment characters. It is probably a good idea to try 
globally removing or substituting these, as they will probably cause 
trouble later even if they can be read in.

Jim