It is always good to read the manual page for a function, but especially when it is not working as you expected. In this case if you look at the arguments for read.table(), you will find one called fill=TRUE that is useful in this case.
Based on your ifelse(), you seem to be assuming that a blank is not missing data but a lost game. You may also discover that in your example wins are coded as w and W. Since character variables get converted to factors by default, you could use something like: > levels(test$STATUS) <- c("L", "W", "W") > addmargins(xtabs(~Country+STATUS, test), 2) STATUS Country L W Sum FRA 2 3 5 GER 1 3 4 SPA 2 1 3 UNK 1 2 3 USA 1 2 3 I'll let you figure out how to get the last column. David L. Carlson Department of Anthropology Texas A&M University -----Original Message----- From: R-help [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Ashta Sent: Saturday, November 14, 2015 4:28 PM To: R help <r-help@r-project.org> Subject: [R] Ranking Hi all, I have the following raw data some records don't have the second variable. test <- read.table(textConnection(" Country STATUS USA USA W USA W GER GER W GER w GER W UNK W UNK UNK W FRA FRA FRA W FRA W FRA W SPA SPA W SPA "),header = TRUE, sep= "\t") test It is not reading it correctly. Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings, : line 17 did not have 2 elements After reading I want change the status column to numeric so that I can use the table function test$STATUS <- ifelse(is.na(test$STATUS), 0, 1) at the end I want the following table (Country, Won, Lost , Number of games played and % of score ) and pick the top 3 countries. COUNTRY Won Lost NG %W USA 2 1 3 (2/3)*100 GER 3 1 4 (3/4)*100 UNK 2 1 3 (2/3)*100 FRA 3 2 5 (3/5)*100 SPA 1 2 3 (1/3)*100 Thank you in advance ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.