Hi Pradeep, Any software would be challenged to determine the boundaries between your columns.
ff <- 'http://data.princeton.edu/wws509/datasets/divorce.dat' txt <- readLines(ff) head(txt) # [1] " id heduc heblack mixed years div " " 9 12-15 years No No 10.546 No " # [3] " 11 < 12 years No No 34.943 No " " 13 < 12 years No No 2.834 Yes " # [5] " 15 < 12 years No No 17.532 Yes " " 33 12-15 years No No 1.418 No You don't have tab delimiters but instead have space delimiters (well sort of). Your second column has either one ("12-15 years") or two ("< 12 years") spaces embedded in the values. That will mess up any scheme using spaces to delineate the columns. Perhaps you can read this as fixed width - see ?read.fwf - but you'll have to fiddle with the width specifications. Cheers, Ben > On Jan 17, 2016, at 10:31 AM, Pradeep Bisht <pradeep.bisht0...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > Hello Experts , > > Being a SAS developer I am finding it difficult to perform some of data > cleaning in R that are quite easy to perform in SAS . > > I have been trying to read a .dat file and after a lot of attempts have > failed to find a solution . Maybe R doesn't have the functionality right > now or I am not looking in the right place . Here is my code . > > f5=read.table("http://data.princeton.edu/wws509/datasets/divorce.dat > <http://www.linkedin.com/redir/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdata%2Eprinceton%2Eedu%2Fwws509%2Fdatasets%2Fdivorce%2Edat&urlhash=GVbR&_t=tracking_anet> > ", > header=T, > sep="\t", > colClasses = c("numeric", "character", "character","character", "double", > "character" ) ) > The error i get i > s > this . > Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings, > : > scan() expected 'a real', got '912-15yearsNoNo10.546No' > > Also does read.table always calls scan in background to do its job . If so > why use read.table in first place . > > Pradeep > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > 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. Ben Tupper Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences 60 Bigelow Drive, P.O. Box 380 East Boothbay, Maine 04544 http://www.bigelow.org ______________________________________________ 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.
