CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rread.table
Flobagob
Flobagob

Reputation: 76

Is there a way to coerce R into reading a table with a specific number of columns, so that it fills all columns?

I'm trying to read this table into R.

I know I can skip the first x number of lines to ignore the preamble.

Using this code:

read.table("https://www.physics.mcmaster.ca/~harris/GCS_table.txt",
              header = T,
              sep = "\t",
              skip = 36)

I get the problem that R puts all the data into one column, and doesn't split it into different columns.

I noticed the column headers, once I've read them into R, seem to be separated by decimal points so I've tried:

read.table("https://www.physics.mcmaster.ca/~harris/GCS_table.txt",
              header = F,
              sep = "\t",
              skip = 38)

to avoid the header - which is nicer, but it still forces everything into one column.

I've tried every "sep" argument I can think of, with no luck.

Is there a way I can tell R to fill up x number of columns? Or is this a problem with my "sep" argument?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 130

Answers (1)

Ronak Shah
Ronak Shah

Reputation: 388972

I am not exactly sure how many rows/column you expect in the table but you can try either

data.table::fread("https://www.physics.mcmaster.ca/~harris/GCS_table.txt",
                   header = TRUE,skip = 36)

Or

read.table("https://www.physics.mcmaster.ca/~harris/GCS_table.txt",
            header = TRUE,skip = 36, fill = TRUE)

Upvotes: 1

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