count.fields              package: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'.

Value:

     A vector with the numbers of fields found.

See Also:

     'read.table'

Examples:

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

