读取选项卡分隔文件R中的问题

Question

I am trying to read a tab delimited file that looks like this:

I am using the read.table for this propose but I am not able to read the file.

table<- read.table("/Users/Desktop/R-test/HumanHT-12_V4_0_R2_15002873_B.txt",
                   header =FALSE, sep = "\t", 
                   comment.char="#", check.names=FALSE)

When I run the code I have this error:

Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  : 
  line 1 did not have 2 elements 

What am I doing wrong while reading the table? I am not so familiarized with R, so any help would be really useful.

Answer 1

I am very familiar with this type of file: It is a GEO platform data for Microarray analysis. As baptiste proposed above, the best way is to skip the first few lines by skip=9 . You may replace read.table(...,sep="\\t") with just read.delim(...) . Then you will have your table with suitable column names - please note that the column names should be in the 1st line.

Then if you are really interested in the first 9 lines you may read them by readLines(...) command and paste the data to your table by acting like this:

foo = read.delim(...)
bar = readLines(...)
baz = list(foo, bar)