On Tue, 26 Dec 2000, Peter Kleiweg wrote:
>
> Suppose, I have a file "data1" containing:
>
> 450 390 467 654 30 542 334 432 421
> 357 497 493 550 549 467 575 578 342
> 446 547 534 495 979 479
>
> I can read this file with:
>
> scan("data1")
> Read 24 items
> [1] 450 390 467 654 30 542 334 432 421 357 497 493 550 549 467 575
578 342 446
> [20] 547 534 495 979 479
>
> But now, suppose I have a file "data2" containing:
>
> 450, 390, 467, 654, 30, 542, 334, 432, 421,
> 357, 497, 493, 550, 549, 467, 575, 578, 342,
> 446, 547, 534, 495, 979, 479
>
> When I try to read this with sep="," I get:
>
> scan("data2", sep=",")
> Read 26 items
> [1] 450 390 467 654 30 542 334 432 421 NA 357 497 493 550 549 467
575 578 342
> [20] NA 446 547 534 495 979 479
>
> I get two extra fields, both NA. Not what I'd want. And I can't
> drop the NA's, because there could be other NA's, not resulting
> from this comma-EOL combination.
You can easily remove the trailing commas, though, as in
scan(pipe("sed -e s/,$// data2"), sep=",")
Read 24 items
[1] 450 390 467 654 30 542 334 432 421 357 497 493 550 549 467 575 578
342 446
[20] 547 534 495 979 479
> I suggest, the proper action for scan would be to treat the
> combination sep plus newline as a single separator.
However, that's not compatible with S or earlier versions of R or
the documentation
sep: by default, scan expects to read white-space delimited input
fields. Alternatively, `sep' can be used to specify a
character which delimits fields. A field is always delimited
by a newline unless it is quoted.
I suggest the proper action is to act as documented!
--
Brian D. Ripley, ripley@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 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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