Warning message:In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote, : incomplete final line found by readTableHeader on 'hola.csv'

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Problem: in R I get Warning message:

In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote, : incomplete final line found by readTableHeader on 'hola.csv'

To simplify I created a basic table in excel and I have saved it in all the .csv formats it offers (comma separated values, csv UTF8, MS2 csv etc) and the error persists in all of them. I'm working in mac 10.15 catalina, Excel version 16.29.1 (2019).

I changed the language of my laptop from Spain to Uk, selecting , for groups and . for decimals, as some people here suggested it may be due to some countries languages by default using semicolon instead of commas for csv. After this, as expected, csv are indeed created separated by commas, but I still get the warning.

As suggested, if I open the file in textedit and click enter at the end, saving it afterwards, R works perfectly and the error disappears, but it does not seem practical/efficient to do that every single time I want to open a csv. On the other hand it remains a mystery to me why working colleagues using mac UK configuration do not get this error (neither do I when I open csv they have created on their laptops).

Can it be the Excel version? Should I ignore the warning? (the table looks fine when opening it). thanks!

aq2<-read.csv("hola.csv")
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rcsvlinewarnings
A warning message is different from an error message. It means there might have been a problem whereas an error message means the operation could not be completed. All you need to do is check to make sure the last row was included in the aq2 object (e.g. tail(aq2) or nrow(aq2)). Then you are good to go. – dcarlson

2 Answers

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That is a warning message generated because R's read.table expects the final line to include an end of line character (either or ). It's almost always an unnecessary warning. Many programs including Excel, will create files like that.

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You should carefully read the error message. It says incomplete final line found by readTableHeader. This refers to the last row of your .csv file and suggests that this line is incomplete for R to read. So what could be the problem? If you have a csv (=comma separated values) file, it might well be that each line has a certain formatting. Check if this formatting is consistently applied throughout the file. An issue that often pops up in hand-collected data. If you post an excerpt of your data using tail(aq2) (from tidyverse package) we could have a look at the last line and check the formatting to answer the issue in more depth. Eventually, it is just a warning, not an error message. Still, important to understand warnings.