.csv import to R returns warning message "In scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = quote, dec = dec, :"

Question

I'm attempting to pull description data into R for text mining.

file <- read.csv ("file.csv", stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

returns the following:

Warning Message In scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = quote, dec = dec, : EOF within quoted string

and reduces number of rows by 90%

I have tried adding several things:

skipNul=T
sep = ""
quote = ""

also: read.table('file.csv'....)

all reduce the data by the exact same amount, implying they have no impact on the error

Answer 1

Can you show a preview of the input file you are trying to load? In particular, is the data comma-separated, and are their quotes in the file?

Without knowing more, I would try quote=NULL instead of quote="" since it seems like the parser is being confounded by the presence of quotation marks.

Also, you may want to tail the file to make sure it doesn't end prematurely.