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 -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Skipping-lines-and-incomplete-rows-tp4635830p4636129.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.