CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rtext
Asteroid098
Asteroid098

Reputation: 2825

how to read text file into R

I'm having problem reading text file into R. The text file has 8 columns and a header which looks exactly like this:

ID          1990    1991    1992    1993    1994    1995    1996
A           36.88   45.48   52.46   111.31  138.45  121.09  122.62
B           19.11   27.97   37.14   47.68   60.78   35.84   38.64
C           56.21   74.94   92.3    118.62  138.13  104.65  113.98
D           30.48   51.54   61.57   99.87   80.9    84.97   99.34

When I do the following, I get the error

> extra<- read.table("extrab.txt", header=T, sep="\t")
Error in make.names(col.names, unique = TRUE) : 
  invalid multibyte string at '<ff><fe>I'

So I tried adding fileEnconding

> extra<- read.table("extrab.txt", header=T, sep="\t", fileEncoding="UCS-2LE")

This worked, but I ended up with a dataframe with one variable where ID to 1996 was treated as one column. Would there be a way to solve this?

I'm adding few more lines on this problem, because I found a different error when I tried to import the file through R error text file import

Upvotes: 1

Views: 12505

Answers (2)

josliber
josliber

Reputation: 44340

Now that you aren't getting the file encoding problem, it might just be that your separator is actually not a tab. Try:

extra<- read.table("extrab.txt", header=T, fileEncoding="UCS-2LE")

This will separate on any whitespace

Upvotes: 2

Tommy O&#39;Dell
Tommy O&#39;Dell

Reputation: 7109

As per this SO question, the error you're getting seems to be related to file encoding.

Option 1:

You likely just need to figure out the right file encoding to use.

Example:

extra<- read.table("extrab.txt", header=T, sep="\t", fileEncoding="latin1")

Option 2:

You can try opening the file in Notepad/whatever text editor and then "save as" using a a common format like ANSI, Unicode or UTF-8.

In Windows Notepad, notice there's an "Encoding" dropdown when you SaveAs. ANSI should work fine.

Upvotes: 2

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