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

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?

Answer 1

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