Hi If I understand correctly you maybe could read a file without header, discard last column, read first line of a file and put it as column names.
read.delim(textConnection(infile), header=F, skip=1) scan(textConnection(infile), nlines=1, sep="\t", what=c("","")) Regards Petr r-help-boun...@r-project.org napsal dne 27.04.2011 14:15:33: > > Dear ExpeRts,t > > I am trying to read tab delimted data produced by somewhat brain dead > software that seems to think it's a good idea to have an extra tab > character after the last column - except for the header line. As > explained in the help page, read.delim now assumes that the first > column contains the row.names (which is not even wrong) but now and all > col.names get shiftet by one column. Example: > > infile <- 'sample\tx1\n1\tA\t\n2\tB\t\n3\tA\t' > read.delim(textConnection(infile)) > sample x1 > 1 A NA > 2 B NA > 3 A NA > > So I set row.names to NULL because the man page said "Using > ‘row.names = NULL’ forces row numbering.". Now the row.names really > are numbered automatically but I get a "bonus column": > > read.delim(textConnection(infile), row.names=NULL) > row.names sample x1 > 1 1 A NA > 2 2 B NA > 3 3 A NA > > Hm - not what I want. I am also a bit puzzeled why the extra column is > introduced instead of just using the first col.name. At the moment I > deal with it by fixing the col.names and dumping the extra column: > > dat <- read.delim(textConnection(infile), row.names=NULL) > colnames(dat) <- colnames(dat)[-1] > dat <- dat[-ncol(dat)] > dat > sample x1 > 1 1 A > 2 2 B > 3 3 A > > I worked my way through ?read.delim but could not find an option to > deal with these (flawed) files directly. As the opposite situation > (i.e. more col.names than data) can be fixed with fill=T I was hoping > something like fill.header=T or fill='header' may exist. Did I just > not find it or does it not exist? And if it doesn't - does anyone > else think it would be a nice item for the wishlist? > > cu > Philipp > > > -- > Dr. Philipp Pagel > Lehrstuhl für Genomorientierte Bioinformatik > Technische Universität München > Wissenschaftszentrum Weihenstephan > Maximus-von-Imhof-Forum 3 > 85354 Freising, Germany > http://webclu.bio.wzw.tum.de/~pagel/ > > ______________________________________________ > 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. ______________________________________________ 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.