Import Dat File into R
Apologies in Advance for the Simplicity of This Question. I Am Trying to Import A. Dat File from a Website into R with the Following Code: Www = "" Data
Apologies in advance for the simplicity of this question. I am trying to import a .dat file from a website into R with the following code:
www = ""
data <- read.delim(www, header = TRUE, sep="\t")
I want to access the Value portion of the data.frame, however, I am unsure about the dimensions of the data.frame, if I type ncol(data) it returns 1 which I was expecting three. How do I access the "third" column of this data.frame?
1 Answer
The dat file has some lines of extra information before the actual data. Skip them with the skip argument:
read.table("",
header=TRUE, skip=3)
An easy way to check this if you are unfamiliar with the dataset is to first use readLines to check a few lines, as below:
readLines("",
n=10)
# [1] "Ozone data from CZ03 2009" "Local time: GMT + 0"
# [3] "" "Date Hour Value"
# [5] "01.01.2009 00:00 34.3" "01.01.2009 01:00 31.9"
# [7] "01.01.2009 02:00 29.9" "01.01.2009 03:00 28.5"
# [9] "01.01.2009 04:00 32.9" "01.01.2009 05:00 20.5"
Here, we can see that the actual data starts at [4], so we know to skip the first three lines.
Update
If you really only wanted the Value column, you could do that by:
as.vector(
read.table("",
header=TRUE, skip=3)$Value)
Again, readLines is useful for helping us figure out the actual name of the columns we will be importing.
But I don't see much advantage to doing that over reading the whole dataset in and extracting later.
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