I am trying to read in a pipe delimited file that has rows with varying number of columns, here is my sample data:
A|B|C|D A|B|C|D|E|F A|B|C|D|E A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I A|B|C|D A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J You can see line 6 has 10 columns. Yet, I can't explain why R does like so: > test <- read.delim("mypaths4.txt", sep="|", quote=NULL, header=F, > colClasses="character") > test V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8 V9 1 A B C D 2 A B C D E F 3 A B C D E 4 A B C D E F G H I 5 A B C D 6 A B C D E F G H I 7 J You can see it moved "J" to row 7, I don't understand why it is not left in position 6,10. So, more strange to me, I remove line 1, so my data file contains: A|B|C|D|E|F A|B|C|D|E A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I A|B|C|D A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J and I get a totally different result: > test <- read.delim("mypaths5.txt", sep="|", quote=NULL, header=F, > colClasses="character") > test V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8 V9 V10 1 A B C D E F 2 A B C D E 3 A B C D E F G H I 4 A B C D 5 A B C D E F G H I J what it is that I am doing that is changing the fate of that final "J"? This is just a basic ASCII text file, pipe delimited as shown. I have been racking my brain on this for a day! Brian ______________________________________________ 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.