On Thu, 4 Sep 2008, Steve Murray wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> I have a tab-delimited text (.txt) file which I'm trying to read into
R.
> This file is of column format - there are in fact 3 columns and 259201
> rows (including the column headers). I've been using the following
> commands, but receive an error each time which prevents the data from
> being read in:
How about telling R it is tab-delimited? Use read.delim or at least
sep="\t".
Also, see the footer to this message: we are not clairvoyant and cannot
see the file unless you show us part of it.
With a file of that size you should study the 'R Data Import/Export
Manual' and take some steps to read it in efficiently (e.g. specify
nrows and colClasses).
>> Jan <- read.table("JanuaryAvBurntArea.txt", header=TRUE)
> Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,
:
> line 1 did not have 6 elements
>
>
> I tried removing the 'header' argument, but receive a similar
message:
>
>> Jan <- read.table("JanuaryAvBurntArea.txt")
> Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,
:
> line 2 did not have 6 elements
>
>
> What's more confusing about this is that I know that none of the lines
> have 6 elements! They're not supposed to! Each row only has 3 values
> (one per column)!
I suspect there is whitespace in the 'values'.
>
> As a final resort I tried 'scan':
>
> <- scan("JanuaryAvBurntArea.txt")
> Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,
:
> scan() expected 'a real', got 'Latitude'
>
> ...which is obviously something to do with there being a header as the
first row, but the 'scan' command doesn't seem to have an equivalent
of 'header=TRUE' like read.table...?
>
>
> If anyone is able to shed some light on why I'm receiving these errors,
and how I can get the data into R, then I'd be very grateful to hear them! I
suspect I'm doing something very basic which is wrong!
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Steve
>
>
>
>
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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