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 |
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 |
comment.char |
character: a character vector of length one containing a single character or an empty string. |
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.
Value
A vector with the numbers of fields found.
See Also
Examples
fil <- tempfile()
cat("NAME", "1:John", "2:Paul", file = fil, sep = "\n")
count.fields(fil, sep = ":")
unlink(fil)
Copyright (©) 1999–2012 R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
Licensed under the GNU General Public License.