Thanks for this. I tried switching the file extension from txt to tab, but it seems to still split on whitespace rather than tabs.
My goal is to create a file that is both readable by R and by a spreadsheet program, and that may contain white spaces. If tab-delimited separation is not currently supported on load time, a CSV file would also be a natural candidate. Unfortunately for me, it seems that R expects the CSV file in the 'data' subdirectory to be delimited by semi-colons rather than commas (which seems odd and might be worthy of mention in the Writing R Extensions Manual), and the particular spread-sheet program I use uses commas to delimit CSV files. So, then, I think that I will be unable to use 'data' subdirectory to load this data using data(), but any feedback on this is welcomed. Thanks, Robert -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 21, 2005 1:58 AM To: r-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Rd] read.table error upon package installation (PR#8230) What is the R error here? The default delimiter in read.table is not \t but whitespace, so the first example has 2 and 3 rows (fine for header=T) and the second has 2 and 4 rows. On Fri, 21 Oct 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Upon upgrading to R 2.2.0 on my Windows box, I found that one of my > packages no longer compiled, giving this error: > > Error in read.table(zfile, header =3D TRUE) : > more columns than column names > Execution halted > > After removing every line of code from my package and still not being > able to compile it, I found the error to be related to a .txt file in my > data directory. I reduced my data file to a very simple example which > causes the error, and a nearly identical file which does not cause the > problem. > > A file with these contents causes the error (I am using \t to indicate > the usual tab delimiter). > x \t y > A B C \t DEF > > However, if I remove one of the spaces between A and B or B and C, the > package compiles fine: > x \t y > A BC \t DEF > > I can only guess that there is some kind of parsing problem when there > is more than one space between tab delimiters. Looks more like a user misunderstanding of ?data. -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
