You said the column values were separated by space characters.
Copying the text from gmail shows that some column names and column
values are separated by single spaces (e.g., between x1 and x2) and
some by multiple spaces (e.g., between x3 and x4. Did the mail mess
up the spacing or is there some other way to tell where the omitted
values are?
-Bill
On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 2:54 PM Val <valkremk at gmail.com>
wrote:>
> I Tried that one and it did not work. Please see the error message
> Error in read.table(text = "x1 x2 x3 x4\n1 B12 \n2 C23
> \n322 B32 D34 \n4 D44 \n51 D53\n60 D62 ",
> :
> more columns than column names
>
> On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 5:39 PM Bill Dunlap <williamwdunlap at
gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Since the columns in the file are separated by a space character,
" ",
> > add the read.table argument sep=" ".
> >
> > -Bill
> >
> > On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 2:21 PM Val <valkremk at gmail.com>
wrote:
> > >
> > > Hi all, I am trying to read a messy data but facing difficulty.
The
> > > data has several columns separated by blank space(s). Each
column
> > > value may have different lengths across the rows. The first
> > > row(header) has four columns. However, each row may not have the
four
> > > column values. For instance, the first data row has only the
first
> > > two column values. The fourth data row has the first and last
column
> > > values, the second and the third column values are missing for
this
> > > row.. How do I read this data set correctly? Here is my sample
data
> > > set, output and desired output. To make it clear to each data
point
> > > I have added the row and column numbers. I cannot use fixed width
> > > format reading because each row may have different length for a
> > > given column.
> > >
> > > dat<-read.table(text="x1 x2 x3 x4
> > > 1 B22
> > > 2 C33
> > > 322 B22 D34
> > > 4 D44
> > > 51 D53
> > > 60 D62 ",header=T,
fill=T,na.strings=c("","NA"))
> > >
> > > Output
> > > x1 x2 x3 x4
> > > 1 1 B12 <NA> NA
> > > 2 2 C23 <NA> NA
> > > 3 322 B32 D34 NA
> > > 4 4 D44 <NA> NA
> > > 5 51 D53 <NA> NA
> > > 6 60 D62 <NA> NA
> > >
> > >
> > > Desired output
> > > x1 x2 x3 x4
> > > 1 1 B22 <NA> NA
> > > 2 2 <NA> C33 NA
> > > 3 322 B32 NA D34
> > > 4 4 <NA> NA D44
> > > 5 51 <NA> D53 NA
> > > 6 60 D62 <NA> NA
> > >
> > > Thank you,
> > >
> > > ______________________________________________
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> > > PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> > > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible
code.