[R] Skipping lines and incomplete rows

[arun]

Hi,

I guess you should have "fill=TRUE" in the read.table.

dat1<-read.table(text="
First line: Skip this line
Second line: skip this line
Third line: skip this line
variable1 Variable2 Variable3 Variable4
                  Unit1        Unit2        Unit3
10              0.1              0.01          0.001
20              0.2              0.02          0.002
30              0.3              0.03          0.003
40              0.4              0.04          0.004
",sep="",skip=4, fill=TRUE,header=TRUE)
dat1<-dat1[-1,]
row.names(dat1)<-1:nrow(dat1)
dat1
  variable1 Variable2 Variable3 Variable4
1        10       0.1      0.01     0.001
2        20       0.2      0.02     0.002
3        30       0.3      0.03     0.003
4        40       0.4      0.04     0.004


A.K.




----- Original Message -----
From: vioravis <vioravis at gmail.com>
To: r-help at r-project.org
Cc: 
Sent: Monday, July 9, 2012 6:23 AM
Subject: [R] Skipping lines and incomplete rows

I have a text file that has semi-colon separated values. The table is nearly
10,000 by 585. The files looks as follows:

*******************************************
First line: Skip this line
Second line: skip this line
Third line: skip this line
variable1 Variable2 Variable3 Variable4
                   Unit1         Unit2         Unit3
10              0.1               0.01           0.001
20              0.2               0.02           0.002 
30              0.3               0.03           0.003
40              0.4               0.04           0.004
*******************************************

The first three lines need to be skipped. Moreover, line 5 doesn't have
units for all the variables and hence, has to be skipped as well.
Effectively, I want the following to be read to a dataframe skipping rows 1,
2, 3 and 5.

*******************************************
variable1 Variable2 Variable3 Variable4
10              0.1               0.01           0.001
20              0.2               0.02           0.002 
30              0.3               0.03           0.003
40              0.4               0.04           0.004
*******************************************

I tried using read.table with skip for line 1-3 as follows 

inputData <- read.table("test.txt",sep = ";",skip = 3)

but the line 4 is creating problem with the following error:

Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings, 
: 
  line 3 did not have 585 elements

Can someone help me with this?

Thank you.

Ravi

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