CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rdatasetdata-cleaning
Matteo Fasiolo
Matteo Fasiolo

Reputation: 561

Loading dataframe containing useless characters in R

I have an executable that outputs a table every time it is called by R. I then want to load the dataframe in R, but it contains lots of "!", for instance:

! A B C
  0 1 2
  3 3 2
  1 1 1
!
  3 4 2
  2 2 3
  5 2 5
!
  3 4 2
  .....

so that I get:

sim_stat <- read.table("C:/Users/Matteo/Desktop/Forest/Formind/formind-model/result/result.dia")
# Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  : 
#  line 2 did not have 11 elements

I need to read the data in R every second more or less, so is there a fast way to remove those "!" ? I am working in Windows. Thanks!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 63

Answers (2)

Greg Snow
Greg Snow

Reputation: 49640

You can follow the same idea as in this answer, just remove the exclamation mark (or any other unwanted characters) instead of the commas.

Upvotes: 1

Se&#241;or O
Se&#241;or O

Reputation: 17412

You can have ! treated as a comment character:

read.table(file="...", comment.char="!")

That will get rid of the header, or any other lines with an extraneous !. If you have data in a line with !, and you want to ignore the ! but keep the rest, there is this long workaround:

> read.table(text=gsub("!", "", readChar("test.txt", file.info("test.txt")$size)), header=TRUE)
  A B C
1 0 1 2
2 3 3 2
3 1 1 1
4 3 4 2
5 2 2 3
6 5 2 5
7 3 4 2

Obviously replacing "test.txt" with your file name in both instances, and "!" with whatever character(s) to be ignored.

Upvotes: 4

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