R: Count the Number of Fields per Line

count.fields {utils}

R Documentation

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 `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 `TRUE` blank 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.

Examples

cat("NAME", "1:John", "2:Paul", file = "foo", sep = "\n")
count.fields("foo", sep = ":")
unlink("foo")

[Package utils version 3.4.1 Index]