[datatable-help] fread: skip

[Gabor Grothendieck]

I would find it useful if fread had a skip= argument as in read.table
since I have files from time to time that have garbage at the top.
Another situation I find from time to time is that the header is
messed up but one can still read the file if one can skip over the
header and specify header = FALSE.

An extra feature that would be nice but less important would be if one
could specify skip = "string" and have it skip all lines until it
found one with "string": in it and then start reading from the matched
row onward.   Normally the string would be chosen to be a string found
in the header and not likely found prior to the header. read.xls in
gdata has a similar feature  and I find it quite handy at times.

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