Full_Name: Paul Murrell Version: 2.1.0 (unsure how long it has been there) OS: Linux Submission from: (NULL) (130.216.50.118) Submitted by: paul
There seems to be a problem with escaped quotes in read.table. Suppose this is the contents of a text file called "temp.txt" ... 6 'TV2 Shortland Street' 2 'I don\'t watch TV at 7' 1 'I\'m not bothered, whatever that looks good' 2 'I channel surf' > x <- read.table("temp.txt") > x V1 V2 1 2 I channel surf 2 6 TV2 Shortland Street 3 2 I don't watch TV at 7 4 1 I'm not bothered, whatever that looks good 5 2 I channel surf (what is "I channel surf" doing as the first row?!) Problem goes away if I use \" instead of \' or if I leave it as \' and change the outer quotes from single to double. e.g. ... 2 "I don\'t watch TV at 7" Analysis from Brian Ripley: The problem is that readTableHead does not handle embedded quotes and so thinks there are three lines on that file. See the comment in scan.c /* <FIXME> This does not handle escaped quotes, nor does it appear to use the blank.lines.skip arg */ ______________________________________________ R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel