How to ignore leading separators from CSV file in R?

Asked Feb 26 '16 at 00:55

Active Feb 26 '16 at 00:55

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How can I tell R to ignore the leading separators when reading from a CSV file with space separators?

For instance, if I have the file data.txt with the following contents (notice the leading spaces)

   1 2 3
   4 5 6

and then I run

> read.csv ("data.txt", header = FALSE, sep = " ")
  V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6
1 NA NA NA  1  2  3
2 NA NA NA  4  5  6

I get columns V1, V2, V3 that represent the leading spaces and since no values are there, they're full of NAs.

Can I get a data frame with 3 columns and 2 rows from this input directly from read.csv? (or maybe from read.table?)

asked Feb 26 '16 at 00:55

Harald

1

`read.table("data.txt", header=FALSE)` - you don't have a comma separated value file, so don't use `read.csv` Also, `read.csv(text=txt, header=FALSE, sep="")` will work in line with the duplicate question I've just linked. – thelatemail Feb 26 '16 at 00:56
Thank you very much. I had to give read.table a try first! If you make that an answer, I'll accept it. – Harald Feb 26 '16 at 00:57
You don't even need `header=FALSE`. It's the default in `read.table()`. – Rich Scriven Feb 26 '16 at 00:59
So the sep="" is the trick here! – Harald Feb 26 '16 at 01:01
@RichardScriven - you're right, but that suprises me a lot. – thelatemail Feb 26 '16 at 01:01
BTW, yes this may be a duplicate as @thelatemail pointed out. Should I close it? – Harald Feb 26 '16 at 01:02
@Harald - nah, leave it - the duplicate questions all link to one another and sometimes make searching for an answer easier in the future. – thelatemail Feb 26 '16 at 01:10

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