On 12-11-17 4:18 PM, Brian Feeny wrote:
I am trying to read in a pipe delimited file that has rows with varying number
of columns, here is my sample data:
A|B|C|D
A|B|C|D|E|F
A|B|C|D|E
A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I
A|B|C|D
A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J
You can see line 6 has 10 columns. Yet, I can't explain why R does like so:
test <- read.delim("mypaths4.txt", sep="|", quote=NULL, header=F,
colClasses="character")
test
V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8 V9
1 A B C D
2 A B C D E F
3 A B C D E
4 A B C D E F G H I
5 A B C D
6 A B C D E F G H I
7 J
You can see it moved "J" to row 7, I don't understand why it is not left in
position 6,10.
So, more strange to me, I remove line 1, so my data file contains:
A|B|C|D|E|F
A|B|C|D|E
A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I
A|B|C|D
A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J
and I get a totally different result:
test <- read.delim("mypaths5.txt", sep="|", quote=NULL, header=F,
colClasses="character")
test
V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8 V9 V10
1 A B C D E F
2 A B C D E
3 A B C D E F G H I
4 A B C D
5 A B C D E F G H I J
what it is that I am doing that is changing the fate of that final "J"? This
is just a basic ASCII text file, pipe delimited as shown.
I would suggest reading the help file: read.delim only looks at the
first 5 lines to determine the number of columns if you don't specify
the colClasses.
Duncan Murdoch
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