count.fields
Count the Number of Fields per Line
count.fields counts the number of fields, as separated by
sep, in each of the lines of file read.
- Keywords
- file
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
TRUEblank lines in the input are ignored.- 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
library(utils)
# NOT RUN {
fil <- tempfile()
cat("NAME", "1:John", "2:Paul", file = fil, sep = "\n")
count.fields(fil, sep = ":")
unlink(fil)
# }