R help - Aug 2002 - Adding argument 'flush' to read.table() too...

What about adding the argument 'flush=FALSE' to read.table() for the
option
to ignore trailing elements on each row? This feature already exists in
scan(), which is called internally by read.table():

   flush: logical: if `TRUE', `scan' will flush to the end of the line
          after reading the last of the fields requested. This allows
          putting comments after the last field, but precludes putting
          more that one record on a line.

Looking at the code for read.table(), adding argument 'flush=FALSE' and
then
call scan(..., flush=flush) internally seems to be fully backward
compatible. However, I do not know about the S-Plus compatibility.

Comment: I found the need for this when trying to read TAB delimited data
files from an external software that (for unknown reasons) adds several
trailing TAB's to the last 5-10 rows.

Regards,

Henrik Bengtsson

Dept. of Mathematical Statistics @ Centre for Mathematical Sciences
Lund Institute of Technology/Lund University, Sweden (+2h UTC)
+46 46 2229611 (off), +46 708 909208 (cell), +46 46 2224623 (fax)
h b @ m a t h s . l t h . s e, http://www.maths.lth.se/bioinformatics/

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This will not work if the table has no header.  scan() requires you to
specify the fields, but read.table does not and so you cannot know
which fields might be surplus.  Similarly, the header line might have
surplus fields ....


On Sun, 18 Aug 2002, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
> What about adding the argument 'flush=FALSE' to read.table() for
the option
> to ignore trailing elements on each row? This feature already exists in
> scan(), which is called internally by read.table():
>
>    flush: logical: if `TRUE', `scan' will flush to the end of the
line
>           after reading the last of the fields requested. This allows
>           putting comments after the last field, but precludes putting
>           more that one record on a line.
>
> Looking at the code for read.table(), adding argument 'flush=FALSE'
and then
> call scan(..., flush=flush) internally seems to be fully backward
> compatible. However, I do not know about the S-Plus compatibility.
>
> Comment: I found the need for this when trying to read TAB delimited data
> files from an external software that (for unknown reasons) adds several
> trailing TAB's to the last 5-10 rows.
>
> Regards,
>
> Henrik Bengtsson
>
> Dept. of Mathematical Statistics @ Centre for Mathematical Sciences
> Lund Institute of Technology/Lund University, Sweden (+2h UTC)
> +46 46 2229611 (off), +46 708 909208 (cell), +46 46 2224623 (fax)
> h b @ m a t h s . l t h . s e, http://www.maths.lth.se/bioinformatics/
>
>
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> r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
> Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
> (in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at
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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 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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