readr (version 0.1.1)

read_table: Read text file where columns are separated by whitespace.

Description

This is designed to read the type of textual data where each column is separate by one (or more) columns of space. Each line is the same length, and each field is in the same position in every line. It's similar to read.table, but rather parsing like a file delimited by arbitrary amounts of whitespace, it first finds empty columns and then parses like a fixed width file.

Usage

read_table(file, col_names = TRUE, col_types = NULL, na = "NA",
  skip = 0, n_max = -1)

Arguments

file

Either a path to a file, a connection, or literal data (either a single string or a raw vector).

Files ending in .gz, .bz2, .xz, or .zip will be automatically uncompressed. Files starting with

col_names

Either TRUE, FALSE or a character vector of column names.

If TRUE, the first row of the input will be used as the column names, and will not be included in the data frame. If FALSE, column names

col_types

One of NULL, a list, a named list or a string.

If NULL, the column type will be imputed from the first 30 rows on the input. This is convenient (and fast), but not robust. If the imputation fails, you'll need to supply the

na

String to use for missing values.

skip

Number of lines to skip before reading data.

n_max

Maximum number of records to read.

See Also

read_fwf to read fixed width files where each column is not separated by whitespace. read_fwf is also useful for reading tabular data with non-standard formatting.

Examples

# One corner from http://www.masseyratings.com/cf/compare.htm
massey <- system.file("extdata/massey-rating.txt", package = "readr")
cat(read_file(massey))
read_table(massey)

# Sample of 1978 fuel economy data from
# http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/epadata/78data.zip
epa <- system.file("extdata/epa78.txt", package = "readr")
cat(read_file(epa))
read_table(epa, col_names = FALSE)