[R] How to read malformed csv files with read.table?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 22 Aug 2008, Daniel Folkinshteyn wrote:

> on 08/22/2008 10:19 AM Martin Ballaschk said the following:
>> how do I read files that have two header fields less than they have 
>> columns? The easiest solution would be to insert one or two additional 
>> header fields, but I have a lot of files and that would be quite a lot of 
>> awful work.
>> 
>> Any ideas on how to solve that problem?
>> 
>
> you could use read.table with "header = F", that way it will read the table 
> without worrying about column names (they will end up in the first row of the 
> data).

Or, better, use header=FALSE, skip=1 and the col.names arg of 
read.table().

>
> Then, you can just delete the first row, or assign it to names(), or 
> whatever.
>
> if all the columns in all your files have the same names, you can read them 
> all with header=F and col.names=vectorofcolumnnames, and then delete first 
> row (which will contain the incomplete col names from the file).

The trouble with that approach is that your will get all factor columns.

> hope this helps :)
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
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