Using na.string works better:
> x <-
> read.csv("http://www.epa.gov/emap/html/data/surfwatr/data/mastreams/9396/wchem/chmval.txt";,
> skip=84, as.is = TRUE, na.string = '.')
> str(x)
'data.frame': 711 obs. of 75 variables:
$ ALDI : int NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA ...
$ ALDS : chr NA "S" "S" "S" ...
$ ALDSF : chr " " " " " " " " ...
$ ALKCALC : num 106 210.7 73.5 432.6 38.7 ...
$ ALOR : chr NA "S" "S" "S" ...
$ ALORF : chr " " " " " " " " ...
$ ALTD : int 54 36 47 12 19 10 12 5 8 6 ...
$ ALTDF : chr " " " " " " " " ...
$ ANC : num 115 207.2 82.2 435.2 37.4 ...
$ ANCF : chr " " " " " " " " ...
$ ANDEF : num 82.5 52.3 31.8 21.9 12.2 ...
$ ANSUM : num 771 728 328 892 251 ...
$ CA : num 303 529 182 392 124 ...
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.
>
> ______________________________________________
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--
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.
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