Problems with reading a txt file (EOF within quoted string)

r file-io read.table
user3825755 picture user3825755 · Jul 10, 2014 · Viewed 16.3k times · Source

I am trying to use read.table() to import this TXT file into R (contains informations about meteorological stations provided by the WMO):

However, when I try to use 

tmp <- read.table(file=...,sep=";",header=FALSE)

I get this error

eof within quoted string

warning and only 3514 of the 6702 lines appear in 'tmp'. From a quick look at the text file, I couldn't find any seemingly problematic characters.

As suggested in other threads, I also tried quote="". The EOF warning disappeared, but still only 3514 lines are imported.

Any advice on how I can get read.table() to work for this particular txt file?

Answer

Matthew Plourde picture Matthew Plourde · Jul 10, 2014

It looks like your data actually has 11548 rows. This works:

read.table(url('http://weather.noaa.gov/data/nsd_bbsss.txt'), 
    sep=';', quote=NULL, comment='', header=FALSE)

edit: updated according @MrFlick's comment's below.

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