Incomplete final line warning when trying to read a csv file into R

Question

I m trying to read a  csv file into R and upon using this formula   pheasant lt -read table file choose   header TRUE sep        I get this warning message    incomplete final line found by readTableHeader on  C  Documents and Settings       There are a couple of things I thought may have caused this warning  but unfortunately I don t know enough about R to diagnose the problem myself so I thought I d post here in the hope someone else can diagnose it for me     the  csv file was originally an Excel file  which I saved into  csv format the file comprises three columns of data each data column is of a differing length  i e  there are a different number of values in each column I want to compare the means  using t-test or equivalent depending on normal   not normal distribution  of two of the columns at a time  so for example  t-test between column 1 values and column 2 values  then a t-test of column 1 and column 3 values  etc    Any help or suggestions would be seriously appreciated

User · Answer

I got this problem once when I had a single quote as part of the header  When I removed it  i e  renamed the respective column header from Jimmy s data to Jimmys data   the function returned no warnings

User · Answer

In various European locales  as the comma character serves as decimal point  the read csv2 function should be used instead

User · Answer

The problem is easy to resolve  it s because the last line MUST be empty   Say  if your content is   line 1  line2   change it to   line 1  line2  empty line here    Today I met this kind problem  when I was trying to use R to read a JSON file  by using command below   json data lt -fromJSON paste readLines  json01 json    collapse          and I resolve it by my above method

User · Answer

I received the same message  My fix included  I deleted all the additional sheets  tabs  in the  csv file  eliminated non-numeric characters  resaved the file as comma delimited and loaded in R v 2 15 0 using standard language      filename lt -read csv  filename  header TRUE    As an additional safeguard  I closed the software and reopened before I loaded the csv

User · Answer

I realized that several answers have been provided but no real fix yet   The reason  as mentioned above  is a  End of line  missing at the end of the CSV file    While the real Fix should come from Microsoft  the walk around is to open the CSV file with a Text-editor and add a line at the end of the file  aka press return key    I use ATOM software as a text code editor but virtually all basic text editor would do   In the meanwhile  please report the bug to Microsoft   Question  It seems to me that it is a office 2016 problem  Does anyone have the issue on a PC

User · Answer

I tried different solutions  such as using a text editor to insert a new line and get the End Of Line character as recommended in the top answer above  None of these worked  unfortunately   The solution that did finally work for me was very simple  I copy-pasted the content of a CSV file into a new blank CSV file  saved it  and the problem was gone

User · Answer

The problem that you re describing occurred for me when I renamed a  xlsx as  csv   What fixed it for me was going  Save As  and then saving it as a  csv again

User · Answer

I have solved this problem with changing encoding in read table argument from fileEncoding    UTF-16  to fileEncoding    UTF-8

User · Answer

Use readLines    with warn   FALSE  to read the file into a character vector first    After that use the text   option to read the vector into a data frame with read table        pheasant  lt - read table           text   readLines file choose    warn   FALSE            header   TRUE            sep

User · Answer

To fix this issue through R itself  I just used read xlsx     instead of a read csv    Works like a charm   You do not even have to rename  Renaming an xlsx into to csv is not a viable solution

User · Answer

Are you really sure that you selected the  csv file and not the  xls file  I can only reproduce the error if I try to read in an  xls file  If I try to read in a  csv file or any other text file  it s impossible to recreate the error you get    gt  Data  lt - read table  test csv  header T sep       gt  Data  lt - read table  test xlsx  header T sep      Warning message  In read table  test xlsx   header   T  sep            incomplete final line found by readTableHeader on  test xlsx    readTableHead is the c-function that gives the error  It tries to read in the first n lines  standard the first 5   to determine the type of the data  The rest of the data is read in using scan    So the problem is the format of the file   One way of finding out  is to set the working directory to the directory where the file is  That way you see the extension of the file you read in  I know on Windows it s not shown standard  so you might believe it s csv while it isn t    The next thing you should do  is open the file in Notepad or Wordpad  or another editor  and check that the format is equivalent to my file test csv   Test1 Test2 Test3 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4  5 5   6    This file will give you the following dataframe     gt  read table testfile header T sep        Test1 Test2 Test3 1     1     1     1 2     2     2     2 3     3     3     3 4     4     4    NA 5     5     5    NA 6    NA     6    NA   The csv format saved by excel seperates all cells with a comma  Empty cells just don t have a value  read table   can easily deal with this  and recognizes empty cells just fine

User · Answer

Open the file in text wrangler or notepad    and show the formating e g  in text wrangler you do show invisibles   That way you can see the new line or tabs characters Often excel will add all sorts of tabs in the wrong places and not a last new line character  but you need to show the symbols to see this

User · Answer

My work around was that I opened the csv file in a text editor  removed the excessive commas on the last value  then saved the file  For example for the following file  Test1 Test2 Test3 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3 4 4  5 5   6     Remove the commas after 6  then save the file

User · Answer

I ve experienced a similar problem  however this appears to a generic warning  and may not in fact be related to the line-end character  In my case it was giving this error because the file I was using contained Cyrillic characters  once I replaced them with latin characters the error disappeared

User · Answer

The message indicates that the last line of the file doesn t end with an End Of Line  EOL  character  linefeed   n  or carriage return linefeed   r n    The original intention of this message was to warn you that the file may be incomplete  most datafiles have an EOL character as the very last character in the file   The remedy is simple    Open the file Navigate to the very last line of the file Place the cursor the end of that line Press return Save the file

[r] 'Incomplete final line' warning when trying to read a .csv file into R

Examples related to r

Examples related to line-endings

Examples related to read.csv