How to read unformat txt file in r

Question

I want to read below data example in r.

The first column is country name, but when i read in r, it give some error of sep?

My code:

df <- read.table('df.txt', header=T)

My data look like

column1 column 2
spain      20
united kingdom 37
germany 97
republic of china 12

Any suggestion please?

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score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 31 '18 at 13:40

The problem is there are different number of columns for each row (using the delimiter sep=" "). Try

df = readLines("df.txt")

This will give you a vector of strings, where each element is a row in df.txt. You can parse the lines further with

countries = strsplit(df, " ")
countries = sapply(countries, function(x) paste(x[-length(x)], collapse = " "))

to get the countries.

strsplit returns a list, and sapply(...) removes the last element of item in the list, then pastes them all back together.

Your question is probably a duplicate of this question.

1 Answers1