[R] Strange characters that block import

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 10/14/2009 8:25 AM, arnaud Mosnier wrote:
> Dear useRs,
> 
> I try to import a text file that contain some strange characters coming from
> the misinterpretation of foreign language characters by another software
> (see below).
> 
> ----------------------------------------
> Here is an example of text with a line containing characters that bug the
> import
> 
> name;number
> zdsfbg;2
>  ;3
> dtryjh;4
> 
> ----------------------------------------
> 
> R do not want to import lines after those strange characters (i.e. import
> only the first two lines, one is the header, the second the first line of
> data).
> 
> I already try to import using other encoding such as latin1 or UTF-8 but it
> does not solve the problem.
> 
> Replacing those character in a text editor before importing solve the
> solution, but I want that the user of my script do not have to edit the text
> before the analysis in R.
> 
> Any hint ??

Those funny characters are octal 032, Ctrl-Z.  Years ago that was 
defined on DOS/Windows as an end of file marker, and I guess our code 
still honours that.

You can work around it by stating that you're reading from a binary 
file, not a text file:

f <- file("text.txt", "rb")

Then read.csv2(f) fails, but readLines(f) succeeds, so this works:

 > f <- file("c:/temp/test.txt", "rb")
 > read.csv2(textConnection(readLines(f)))
                name number
1            zdsfbg      2
2 \032\032 \032\032      3
3            dtryjh      4

 > close(f)

I don't know if there are any characters that would cause readLines to 
fail, but there might be, so I'd suggest replacing the buggy software 
that caused all the problems in the first place.

Duncan Murdoch



> 
> Thanks
> 
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> 
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