R help - May 2009 - strange behavior when reading csv - line wraps

Dear All,
I am observing a strange behavior and searching the archives and help 
pages didn't help much.
I have a csv with a variable number of fields in each line.

I use
dataPoints <- read.csv(inputFile, head=FALSE, sep=";",fill =TRUE);

to read it in, and it works. But - some lines are long and 'wrap', or 
split and continue on the next line. So when I check the dim of the 
frame, they are not correct and I can see when I do a printout that the 
lines is split into two in the frame. I checked the input file and all 
is good.

an example of the input is:
37;2175168475;13;8.522729;47.19537;16366682 at
N00;30;sculpture;bird;tourism;animal;statue;canon;eos;rebel;schweiz;switzerland;eagle;swiss;adler;skulptur;zug;1750;28;tamron;f28;canton;tourismus;vogel;baar;kanton;xti;tamron1750;1750mm;tamron1750mm;400d;rabbitriotnet;

where the last values occurs on the next line in the data frame.

It does not have to be the last value, as in the follwong example, the 
word "kempten" starts the next line:
39;167757703;12;10.309295;47.724545;21903142 at
N00;36;white;building;tower;clock;clouds;germany;bayern;deutschland;bavaria;europa;europe;eagle;adler;eu;wolke;dome;townhall;rathaus;turm;weiss;allemagne;europeanunion;bundesrepublik;gebaeude;glocke;brd;allgau;kuppel;europ;kempten;niemcy;europo;federalrepublic;europaischeunion;europaeischeunion;germanio;

What could be the reason?

I ws thinking about solving the issue by using a different separator, 
that I would use for the first 7 fields and concatenating all of the 
remaining values into a single stirng value, but could not figure out 
how to do such a substitution in R. Unfortunately, on my system I cannot 
specify a range for sed...

Thanks for any help/pointers
Martin

You need to supply the actual input line so we can see what is happening.
Are you sure you do not have unbalanced quotes in your input (try
quote='')
or do you have comment characters ("#") in your input?

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Martin Tomko
<martin.tomko@geo.uzh.ch>wrote:
> Dear All,
> I am observing a strange behavior and searching the archives and help pages
> didn't help much.
> I have a csv with a variable number of fields in each line.
>
> I use
> dataPoints <- read.csv(inputFile, head=FALSE, sep=";",fill
=TRUE);
>
> to read it in, and it works. But - some lines are long and 'wrap',
or split
> and continue on the next line. So when I check the dim of the frame, they
> are not correct and I can see when I do a printout that the lines is split
> into two in the frame. I checked the input file and all is good.
>
> an example of the input is:
> 37;2175168475;13;8.522729;47.19537;16366682@N00
>
;30;sculpture;bird;tourism;animal;statue;canon;eos;rebel;schweiz;switzerland;eagle;swiss;adler;skulptur;zug;1750;28;tamron;f28;canton;tourismus;vogel;baar;kanton;xti;tamron1750;1750mm;tamron1750mm;400d;rabbitriotnet;
>
> where the last values occurs on the next line in the data frame.
>
> It does not have to be the last value, as in the follwong example, the word
> "kempten" starts the next line:
> 39;167757703;12;10.309295;47.724545;21903142@N00
>
;36;white;building;tower;clock;clouds;germany;bayern;deutschland;bavaria;europa;europe;eagle;adler;eu;wolke;dome;townhall;rathaus;turm;weiss;allemagne;europeanunion;bundesrepublik;gebaeude;glocke;brd;allgau;kuppel;europ;kempten;niemcy;europo;federalrepublic;europaischeunion;europaeischeunion;germanio;
>
> What could be the reason?
>
> I ws thinking about solving the issue by using a different separator, that
> I would use for the first 7 fields and concatenating all of the remaining
> values into a single stirng value, but could not figure out how to do such
a
> substitution in R. Unfortunately, on my system I cannot specify a range for
> sed...
>
> Thanks for any help/pointers
> Martin
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help@r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html<http://www.r-project.org/posting-guide.html>
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>


-- 
Jim Holtman
Cincinnati, OH
+1 513 646 9390

What is the problem that you are trying to solve?

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