[R] Reading a tab delimted file of varying length using read.table

[Pradeep Bisht]

Hello Experts  ,

Being a SAS developer I am finding it difficult to perform some of data
cleaning in R that are quite easy to perform in SAS .

I have been trying to read a .dat file and after a lot of attempts have
failed to find a solution . Maybe R doesn't have the functionality right
now or I am not looking in the right place . Here is my code .

f5=read.table("http://data.princeton.edu/wws509/datasets/divorce.dat
<http://www.linkedin.com/redir/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdata%2Eprinceton%2Eedu%2Fwws509%2Fdatasets%2Fdivorce%2Edat&urlhash=GVbR&_t=tracking_anet>
",
header=T,
sep="\t",
colClasses = c("numeric", "character", "character","character", "double",
"character" ) )
The error i get i
​s​
this .
Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,
:
scan() expected 'a real', got '912-15yearsNoNo10.546No'

Also does read.table always calls scan in background to do its job . If so
why use read.table in first place .

Pradeep​

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