[R] Problem loading a txt file as a data.frame

[Prof Brian Ripley]

The first-round answer to such questions is to try read.delim().

Why?  Because the issues are often comment characters (#) or quotes(').
It is also possible that you have unmatched ", but that usually indicates 
something more serious.

On Fri, 5 Oct 2007, Ettinger, Nicholas wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I know that this is a terribly banal question but I cannot seem to solve
> it.
>
> I am trying to load in data from a tab-delimited text file.  Some
> columns are mixed text-numbers and other columns are strictly numbers.
> Some cells are blank.
>
> My command is:
>> MDMT_RPup	<-	read.table("GCRMA_MDM-T_RPup.txt", header=T,
> sep="\t", row.names=NULL, fill=TRUE)
>
> The problem is that this text file should load with 118 rows, 7 columns
> of data.  But when I execute the following command:
>
>> dim(MDMT_RPup)
> I only get:
>> 40  7
>
> Other similarly generated text files of varying sizes (9 rows, 72 rows,
> etc.) seem to load just fine with the appropriate number of rows.
>
> I have tried opening the text file in MS Excel and deleting all columns
> to the right of the data in case there was some kind of hidden
> character.  No help.
>
> I realize that this is a small problem, but I'm stumped.
>
> Thanks in advance for any help!
> --Nick
>
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>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595