read.csv, header on first line, skip second line

Question

I have a CSV file with two header rows, the first row I want to be the header, but the second row I want to discard. If I do the following command:

data <- read.csv("HK Stocks bbg.csv", header = T, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

The first row becomes the header and the second row of the file becomes the first row of my data frame:

  Xaaaaaaaaa       X X.1     Xbbbbbbbbbb     X.2 X.3
1         Date PX_LAST  NA         Date PX_LAST  NA
2   31/12/2002  38.855  NA   31/12/2002  19.547  NA
3   02/01/2003  38.664  NA   02/01/2003  19.547  NA
4   03/01/2003  40.386  NA   03/01/2003  19.547  NA
5   06/01/2003  40.386  NA   06/01/2003  19.609  NA
6   07/01/2003  40.195  NA   07/01/2003  19.609  NA

I want to skip this second row of the CSV file and just get

  X1.HK.Equity       X X.1 X2.HK.Equity     X.2 X.3
2   31/12/2002  38.855  NA   31/12/2002  19.547  NA
3   02/01/2003  38.664  NA   02/01/2003  19.547  NA
4   03/01/2003  40.386  NA   03/01/2003  19.547  NA
5   06/01/2003  40.386  NA   06/01/2003  19.609  NA
6   07/01/2003  40.195  NA   07/01/2003  19.609  NA

I tried data <- read.csv("HK Stocks bbg.csv", header = T, stringsAsFactors = FALSE, skip = 1) but that returns:

        Date PX_LAST  X     Date.1 PX_LAST.1 X.1
1 31/12/2002  38.855 NA 31/12/2002    19.547  NA
2 02/01/2003  38.664 NA 02/01/2003    19.547  NA
3 03/01/2003  40.386 NA 03/01/2003    19.547  NA
4 06/01/2003  40.386 NA 06/01/2003    19.609  NA
5 07/01/2003  40.195 NA 07/01/2003    19.609  NA
6 08/01/2003  40.386 NA 08/01/2003    19.547  NA

The header row comes from the second line of my CSV file, not the first line.

Thank you.

Answer 1

This should do the trick:

all_content = readLines("file.csv")
skip_second = all_content[-2]
dat = read.csv(textConnection(skip_second), header = TRUE, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

The first step using readLines reads the entire file into a list, where each item in the list represents a line in the file. Next, you discard the second line using the fact that negative indexing in R means select all but this index. Finally, we feed this data to read.csv to process it into a data.frame.