hi, list R is undoudtedly my favorite statistic tool, however, the data inputnpart has long been a pain. most data I have to deal with are irregular and contains special character.
Recently I get a tab delimited data, read.table(filename,sep="\t") constantly return erors for certain rows does not has xyz elements while all other programs such as perl,python, awk all report equal row length if use "\t" as seperator. I scout through the problematic row, sometimes it is because a row contains a "#", so I go back to specify comment.char="" next it will be some other problems, for some rows I simply can't figure out what the problem is. can I have any guru suggestion to save this pain now and in the future, is CSV a safer format? or can anyone let me know what are the fundamental principles I must bear in mind when do preliminary data processing using other programs such as perl to ensure the output can be readily feed into R. best yong ______________________________________________ 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 and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
