Use read_table to read a file with quoted header names in tidyverse

Question

I have a file with this format

     "date" "obs"
2010060101 0.015
2010060102 0.015

I can read it with

read.table("filehour.txt", header=TRUE)

To get:

        date   obs  
1 2010060101 0.015
2 2010060102 0.015
3 2010060103 0.015

And I get a data.frame with the column names unquoted which is what I want so it works ok. But when I try to use the tidyverse style with read_table to return a tibble instead of a data.frame like so:

read_table2("filehour.txt")

I get

-- Column specification -----------------------------------------------
cols(
  `"date"` = col_double(),
  `"obs"` = col_double()
)

with the header names quoted which I don't want because then I would have to reference them as

`"date"` 
`"obs"`

I could name the column names with read_table parameter col.names but isn't read_table2 the equivalent to read.table or is there any other function or parameter to get the same results without having to explicitly name the columns using the tidyverse package?.

Ronak Shah Ronak Shah · Accepted Answer · 2021-01-20T13:05:59

Use read_delim which has quote argument which is absent in read_table.

readr::read_delim("filehour.txt", ' ')

Use read_table to read a file with quoted header names in tidyverse

1 Answers