On Wed, 5 Jul 2006, Peter Dalgaard wrote: > Prof Brian Ripley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> On Wed, 5 Jul 2006, Peter Dalgaard wrote: >> >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: >>> >>>> (1) read.table(), with sep="\t", identifies 13 our of 1400 records, >>>> in a file with 1400 records of 3 fields each, as having only 2 fields. >>>> This happens under version 2.3.1 for Windows as well as with >>>> R 2.3.1 for Mac OS X, and with R-devel under Mac OS X. >>>> [R version 2.4.0 Under development (unstable) (2006-07-03 r38478)] >>>> >>>> (2) Using read.table() with sep="\t", the first 1569 records only >>>> of a 1821 record file are input. The file has exactly two fields >>>> in each record, and the minimum length of the second field is >>>> 1 character. If however I extract lines 1561 to 1650 from the >>>> file (the file "short.txt" below), all 90 lines are input. >>> >>> Notice that the single quote is a quote character in read.table (as >>> opposed to read.delim, which uses only the double quote, to cater for >>> TAB-separated files from Excel & friends). >>> >>>> [1] "865\tlinear model (lm)! Cook's distance\t152" >>> ^ >>> !!!! >>> >>> (This reminds me that we probably should shift the default for >>> comment.char too since it leads to similar issues, but it seems not to >>> be the problem in this case.) >> >> This seems to imply that we should change the default for 'quote': to >> do so could break a lot of scripts. (Given how long the default has >> been >> comment.char="#", I doubt if we should change that either.) > > Sorry, unclear. We already change quote= for read.delim and read.csv, > and I was suggesting also to modify the default for comment.char for > those functions, but definitely not for read.table. > > Arguably, those functions are there to handle file formats generated > by other programs, and it is unlikely that such programs will generate > comment lines starting with #, whereas we have learned that Excel will > occasionally generate fields like #NULL#, which mess up the parsing.
Ah, that does seem a sensible defensive move. -- 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
