[datatable-help] fread: skip

[Matthew Dowle]

Hi,

Does the auto skip feature of fread cover both of those?  From ?fread :

   " Once the separator is found on line autostart, the number of 
columns is determined. Then the file is searched backwards from 
autostart until a row is found that doesn't have that number of columns, 
or the start of file is reached. Thus, the first data row is found and 
any human readable banners are automatically skipped. This feature can 
be particularly useful for loading a set of files which may not all have 
consistently sized banners. "

There were also some issue with header=FALSE in the first release 
(1.8.8) which have since been fixed in 1.8.9.

Matthew


On 11.05.2013 23:16, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> 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.
>
> --
> Statistics & Software Consulting
> GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc.
> tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP
> email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com
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