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:

> mydata <- 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?

@SimonO101 if you put that as an answer I will accept – bernie2436 Oct 18 '13 at 17:19 — bernie2436, Oct 18 '13 at 17:19
Your data is not in the table format, why use read.table? – Fernando Oct 18 '13 at 17:20 — Fernando, Oct 18 '13 at 17:20

Simon O'Hanlon · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-18T17:42:17.423

111

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

edited Oct 18 '13 at 17:42

answered Oct 18 '13 at 17:22

Simon O'Hanlon

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+1, but I think you meant to uncomment that second line and I think you meant to add `header = FALSE` considering your sample data, right? – A5C1D2H2I1M1N2O1R2T1 Oct 18 '13 at 17:40
@AnandaMahto `header=FALSE` is the default, and yes, shouldn't be an octothorpe in that! Not sure how that ended up there!! EDIT: So given the data you are of course (as usual) right – Simon O'Hanlon Oct 18 '13 at 17:42
2

I fixed the same issue just using `read.delim()` instead of `read.table()`. – Gian Arauz Nov 04 '21 at 09:57

Fernando · Answer 2 · 2013-10-18T17:17:10.693

2

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()).

edited Oct 18 '13 at 17:17

answered Oct 18 '13 at 17:10

Fernando

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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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