Confusing error in R Error in scan file what nmax sep dec quote skip nlines na strings line 1 did not have 42 elements

Question

I am new to R  I am trying to read in a  CSV  file that is space-space delimited  The file does not have headers  It looks like this   Element1 Element2 Element5 Element6 Element7   I am trying to read it in like this     gt  mydata  lt - read table   PathTo file csv   Error in scan file  what  nmax  sep  dec  quote  skip  nlines  na strings        line 1 did not have 14 elements   Why does it expect 14 elements in the first row  How do I import this file

User · Accepted Answer

read table wants to return a data frame  which must have an element in each column  Therefore R expects each row to have the same number of elements and it doesn t fill in empty spaces by default  Try read table   PathTo file csv    fill   TRUE   to fill in the blanks   e g   read table  text   Element1 Element2 Element5 Element6 Element7    fill   TRUE   header   FALSE            V1       V2       V3  1 Element1 Element2           2 Element5 Element6 Element7   A note on whether or not to set header   FALSE    read table tries to automatically determine if you have a header row thus      header is set to TRUE if and only if the first row contains one fewer field than the number of columns

User · Answer

To read characters try  scan   PathTo file csv         If you re reading numeric values  then just use  scan   PathTo file csv     scan by default will use white space as separator  The type of the second arg defines  what  to read  defaults to double

[r] Confusing error in R: Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings, : line 1 did not have 42 elements)

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