This worked fine for me:

> x <- 
> read.csv("http://www.epa.gov/emap/html/data/surfwatr/data/mastreams/9396/wchem/chmval.txt";,
>  skip=84, as.is = TRUE)
> str(x)
'data.frame':   711 obs. of  75 variables:
 $ ALDI    : chr  "." "." "." "." ...
 $ ALDS    : chr  "." "S" "S" "S" ...
 $ ALDSF   : chr  " " " " " " " " ...
 $ ALKCALC : chr  "106.05" "210.7" "73.51" "432.63" ...
 $ ALOR    : chr  "." "S" "S" "S" ...
 $ ALORF   : chr  " " " " " " " " ...
 $ ALTD    : chr  "54" "36" "47" "12" ...
 $ ALTDF   : chr  " " " " " " " " ...
 $ ANC     : chr  "115" "207.2" "82.2" "435.2" ...


On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 12:46 PM, chuck.01 <charliethebrow...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Here is a link to some data:
> http://www.epa.gov/emap/html/data/surfwatr/data/mastreams/9396/wchem/chmval.txt
>
> I am trying to read this in, and want to use:
> chmval <-
> read.table("http://www.epa.gov/emap/html/data/surfwatr/data/mastreams/9396/wchem/chmval.txt";,
> sep=",", skip= 84, header=T)
>
> the # 84, for 84 lines skipped needs to be derived from the 5th line of the
> txt file
> # Header Records:  85
>
> so, I need that # (-1) for input into the read.table statement above
>
> I've tried grep but that didn't work:
>  (for this I downloaded the txt file and manually removed that hash mark!)
>
> grep("Header Records:", read.table("chmval.txt", header=T))
> Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,
> :
>   line 1 did not have 5 elements
>
> Any ideas?
> Can I just extract the 5th line?
>
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: 
> http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/extracting-information-from-txt-file-tp4648033.html
> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
> ______________________________________________
> 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.



-- 
Jim Holtman
Data Munger Guru

What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
Tell me what you want to do, not how you want to do it.

______________________________________________
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.

Reply via email to