I thought that setting colClasses to numeric would coerce errant data to NA. Instead read.table is throwing errors. This is not what I remember from prior experience with read.table and it is not how I read the help page as promising:
BE<- c(" 1841 96 42.26 31.50 73.75 ", " 1841 97 29.56 20.78 50.34 ", " 1841 98 18.71 10.59 29.30 ", " 1841 99 10.48 6.23 16.71 ", " 1841 100 6.14 4.23 10.37 ", " 1841 101 3.31 2.06 5.38 ", " 1841 102 1.50 0.83 2.34 ", " 1841 103 0.33 0.05 0.38 ", " 1841 104 0.00 0.00 0.00 ", " 1841 105 0.00 0.00 0.00 ", " 1841 106 0.00 0.00 0.00 ", " 1841 107 0.00 0.00 0.00 ", " 1841 108 0.00 0.00 0.00 ", " 1841 109 0.00 0.00 0.00 ", " 1841 110+ 0.00 0.00 0.00 ", " 1842 0 60290.60 62238.19 122528.79 ", " 1842 1 54893.31 55849.06 110742.37 ", " 1842 2 51991.87 53033.62 105025.49 ", " 1842 3 49697.90 50789.01 100486.91 ", " 1842 4 47598.24 48414.78 96013.02 ", " 1842 5 46202.38 47106.34 93308.72 " ) #----------- BELe<-read.table(text=BE, header=FALSE, colClasses="numeric", as.is=TRUE) Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings, : scan() expected 'a real', got '110+' I originally got this when reading from a file, but the error is from scan(). Was this an unfortunate side-effect of adding the `text` argument to read.table? It does still persist when the character string is pass through textConnection tot he file argument: BELe<-read.table(file=textConnection(BE), header=FALSE, colClasses="numeric") Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings, : scan() expected 'a real', got '110+' My memory was that such coercion was effective in past years. -- David Winsemius Alameda, CA, USA ______________________________________________ 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.