read.table not working for importing a .dat

Question

I am trying to import a data set from a .dat file off the internet using the read.table command. I usually have no issues when the file is formatted, for example:

A B
1 2
3 4

But this data set is formatted

A B A B
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8

(You can find the data set I'm having issues with here: https://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~jeffwu/book/data/BrainandBodyWeight.dat)

My current line of code is:

Data2 = read.table("https://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~jeffwu/book/data/BrainandBodyWeight.dat", header = TRUE)

The error I'm getting is:

Error in scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = quote, dec = dec, : line 1 did not have 12 elements

If you are just trying to read as is then use fill=TRUE parameter in read.table, read.table("https://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~jeffwu/book/data/BrainandBodyWeight.dat", header = TRUE, fill = TRUE), since the later columns don't contain any values, it will be populated with NAs — PKumar
Does this answer your question? Issue when importing dataset: `Error in scan(...): line 1 did not have 145 elements` — AlvaroMartinez
@PKumar that worked to get rid of the error but I need just two columns. The data set is just two column names but is displayed as 6 different columns with each name showing up twice. I am trying to get all the data into the appropriate column — Michael Visconti

Ian Campbell Ian Campbell · Accepted Answer · 2021-02-04T03:00:45

The problem is there are spaces in the header row, so just skip that with skip = 1.

From there, we can extract the even and odd rows using a repeating logical vector c(TRUE, FALSE) and c(FALSE, TRUE).

The final line of the data has some empty values, so remove those with complete.cases().

data <- read.table("https://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~jeffwu/book/data/BrainandBodyWeight.dat",
                   header = FALSE, fill = TRUE, skip = 1)

result <- data.frame(Body.Wt = unname(unlist(data[,c(T,F)])),
                     Brain.Wt = unname(unlist(data[,c(F,T)])))

result <- result[complete.cases(result),]
head(result)
  Body.Wt Brain.Wt
1   3.385     44.5
2   0.480     15.5
3   1.350      8.1
4 465.000    423.0
5  36.330    119.5
6  27.660    115.0

read.table not working for importing a .dat

1 Answers