count.fields counts the number of fields, as separated by
sep, in each of the lines of file read.
count.fields(file, sep = "", quote = "\"'", skip = 0,
blank.lines.skip = TRUE, comment.char = "#")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.
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.
the set of quoting characters
the number of lines of the data file to skip before beginning to read data.
logical: if TRUE blank lines in the
input are ignored.
character: a character vector of length one containing a single character or an empty string.
A vector with the numbers of fields found.
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.
# NOT RUN {
fil <- tempfile()
cat("NAME", "1:John", "2:Paul", file = fil, sep = "\n")
count.fields(fil, sep = ":")
unlink(fil)
# }