Reading a string with special character in R

Question

I have a little problem in reading a file in R. In particular, I run a script that load a file, say X, which stores a string per each line. There are string with special characters like, ' and therefore I get some errors.

I run the script by command line as follows

Rscript.exe MyScript.R "C:\X.txt"

The content of file X is, for instance:

I'll win a prize
I'll shutdown my pc

The MyScript.R script initially loads the file X.txt as follows

args <- commandArgs(TRUE)
args <- read.table(args[1], sep="\n")

and then uses it as follows:

print(nrow(args))

The previous line returns 0. However, if I remove the ' character from the two lines in file X.txt then everything works fine (ie, and the returned length is 2).

Any solution to handle this tricky input?

Answer 1

read.table is meant for reading structured data, ie data that is in the form of multiple fields per row. If you just want to read a bunch of strings, use readLines .

args <- readLines(args[1])