To me this file looks like a CSV with 15 fields (on each line) not 16, the last field being empty with the exception of the one which has the 'B'. The 14th is always empty.
I also note that it does not seem to have a new line at the end. I can strongly recommend QSV to manipulate CSV files and CSVIEW to look at them After renaming the file for convenience you can do something like qsv input --trim-fields --trim-headers sample.csv \ | qsv select -n "1,2,6,7,8,9,10" \ | qsv rename "date,c2,type,c4,c5,c6,c7" \ | csview -i5 -np0 and get something like ┌──┬────────────────┬──────┬───────┬────┬────┬──┬──┐ │# │ date │ c2 │ type │ c4 │ c5 │c6│c7│ ├──┼────────────────┼──────┼───────┼────┼────┼──┼──┤ │1 │1980-01-01 10:00│226918│WAHRAIN│5124│1001│0 │ │ │2 │1980-01-01 10:00│228562│WAHRAIN│491 │1001│0 │ │ │3 │1980-01-01 10:00│231581│WAHRAIN│5213│1001│0 │ │ │4 │1980-01-01 10:00│232671│WAHRAIN│487 │1001│0 │ │ │5 │1980-01-01 10:00│232913│WAHRAIN│5243│1001│0 │ │ │6 │1980-01-01 10:00│234362│WAHRAIN│5265│1001│0 │ │ │7 │1980-01-01 10:00│234682│WAHRAIN│5271│1001│0 │ │ │8 │1980-01-01 10:00│235389│WAHRAIN│5279│1001│0 │ │ │9 │1980-01-01 10:00│236466│WAHRAIN│497 │1001│0 │ │ │10│1980-01-01 10:00│243350│SREW │484 │1001│0 │ │ │11│1980-01-01 10:00│243350│WAHRAIN│484 │1001│0 │0 │ └──┴────────────────┴──────┴───────┴────┴────┴──┴──┘ As the files do not have headers, you could, if you have multiple files, even do something like qsv cat rows s*.csv \ | qsv input --trim-fields --trim-headers \ | qsv select -n "1,2,6,7,8,9,10" \ | qsv rename "date,c2,type,c4,c5,c6,c7" \ | qsv dedup 2>/dev/null -o readmeintoR.csv If it was REALLY a file with different numbers of fields you can use CSVQ and do something like cat s*csv \ | csvq --format CSV --no-header --allow-uneven-fields \ "SELECT c1 as date, c2, c6 as type, c7 as c4, c8 as c5, c9 as c6, c10 as c7 FROM stdin" \ | qsv input --trim-fields --trim-headers \ | qsv dedup 2>/dev/null -o readmeintoR.csv And, finally, depending on how long the reading of the CSV takes, I would save it into a RDS, loading of which is very fast. greetings, el On 2022-09-29 17:26 , Nick Wray wrote: > Hi Bert > > Right Thing is, I didn't know that there even was an instruction like > read.csv(text = "... your text... ") so at any rate I can paste the > original text files in by hand if there's no shorter cut > Thanks v much Nick [...] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.