count.fields: Count the Number of Fields per Line

Description

count.fields counts the number of fields, as separated by sep, in each of the lines of file read.

Usage

count.fields(file, sep = "", quote = "\"'", skip = 0, blank.lines.skip = TRUE, comment.char = "#")

Arguments

file

a character string naming an ASCII data file, or a connection, which will be opened if necessary, and if so closed at the end of the function call.

sep

the field separator character. Values on each line of the file are separated by this character. By default, arbitrary amounts of whitespace can separate fields.

quote

the set of quoting characters

skip

the number of lines of the data file to skip before beginning to read data.

blank.lines.skip

logical: if TRUE blank lines in the input are ignored.

comment.char

character: a character vector of length one containing a single character or an empty string.

Value

A vector with the numbers of fields found.

Details

This used to be used by read.table and can still be useful in discovering problems in reading a file by that function.

For the handling of comments, see scan. Consistent with scan, count.fields allows quoted strings to contain newline characters. In such a case the starting line will have the field count recorded as NA, and the ending line will include the count of all fields from the beginning of the record.

Examples

Run this code

cat("NAME", "1:John", "2:Paul", file = "foo", sep = "\n")
count.fields("foo", sep = ":")
unlink("foo")