CODEWITHSUNDEEP
r
user1569940
user1569940

Reputation: 83

Duplicate Row Names Not Allowed

I am trying to load in a set of data into R. It is a text document for a simple stats project.

flights<-read.table("flights.txt")

however when I do this I am getting the error "Error in read.table("FLIGHTS.txt") : duplicate 'row.names' are not allowed"

Here is a sample of what the text document looks like.

Flight  Plane_ID    Dep_Delay   Taxi_Out    Taxi_In_Arr_Delay
1   N338AA  -2  30  12  -32
1   N329AA  -1  19  13  -25
1   N319AA  -2  12  8   -26
1   N319AA  2   19  21  -6
1   N329AA  -2  18  17  5
1   N320AA  0   22  11  -15

I also added in the underscores for the names because I was getting an error pertaining to the number of elements in each line.

After putting in row.names = NULL I am getting this output

 row.names Flight Plane_ID Dep_Delay Taxi_Out Taxi_In_Arr_Delay
1          1 N338AA       -2        30       12               -32
2          1 N329AA       -1        19       13               -25
3          1 N319AA       -2        12        8               -26
4          1 N319AA        2        19       21                -6

There is an extra set of row numbers and it displays row.names, any way to get rid of this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2779

Answers (1)

akrun
akrun

Reputation: 886948

data.frame cannot take duplicate row names. We could use row.names=NULL within the read.table, which will create an extra column row.names that can be removed by subsetting the dataset.

dat <- read.table('flights.txt', row.names=NULL)
dat <- dat[-1]

Another option would be to use awk to replace the first column by '' from line 2 onwards in the 'flights.txt', pipe and read using read.table

 dat1 <- read.table(pipe("awk 'NR >1{$1=\"\"}1' flights.txt"),
       header=TRUE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
 dat1
 #   Flight Plane_ID Dep_Delay Taxi_Out Taxi_In_Arr_Delay
 #1 N338AA       -2        30       12               -32
 #2 N329AA       -1        19       13               -25
 #3 N319AA       -2        12        8               -26
 #4 N319AA        2        19       21                -6
 #5 N329AA       -2        18       17                 5
 #6 N320AA        0        22       11               -15

Upvotes: 1

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