?readLines I'm sure Perl will do nicely, but you can also use readLines and grep() or regexpr() the result in R as you would in Perl to find where the problem lies. ?nchar can also help to find a non-printing character that may be messing you up. It's no fun, I know. Excel files can be a particular pain, especially in their handling of missings.
-- Bert Gunter Genentech Non-Clinical Statistics South San Francisco, CA "The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process." - George E. P. Box > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Sean Davis > Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 12:12 PM > To: r-help > Subject: [R] read.table > > I have a commonly recurring problem and wondered if folks would share > tips. I routinely get tab-delimited text files that I need > to read in. > In very many cases, I get: > > > a <- read.table('junk.txt.txt',header=T,skip=10,sep="\t") > Error in scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = > quote, dec = > dec, : > line 67 did not have 88 elements > > I am typically able to go through the file and find a single quote or > something like that causing the problem, but with a recent set of > files, I haven't been able to find such an issue. What can I > do to get > around this problem? I can use perl, also.... > > Thanks, > Sean > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide! > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
