Read table with separator = k white space with k variable

Question

I have a text file with data separated by white spaces. The number of white space is varying and I cannot use read.table. Do you have advices (ps I am on windows).

Two lines from the file:

 13001  200901010200    11.49   -23.01  -999.00
 46001  200904300200    56.30  -148.00  -999.00

Answer 1

Even with your edit, the issue still isn't clear. Your example works for me.

Lines <-
"13001  200901010200    11.49   -23.01  -999.00
46001  200904300200    56.30  -148.00  -999.00"

con <- textConnection(Lines)
x <- read.table(con)
close(con)
x
#      V1           V2    V3      V4   V5
# 1 13001 200901010200 11.49  -23.01 -999
# 2 46001 200904300200 56.30 -148.00 -999

The default value of sep="" works because (as it says in ?read.table):

If ‘sep = ""’ (the default for ‘read.table’) the separator is ‘white space’, that is one or more spaces, tabs, newlines or carriage returns.

Answer 2

Using sep="" is logically equivalent to any amount of whitespace (in regex terms, "\s+").

To read your data using read.delim() or read.table(), use:

read.delim(fileName, sep="")

This also removes leading whitespace (before the first column).