parsing failure- read_fwf includes a column of NAs when told to ignore the column? #322
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I ran into the same problem, getting parsing errors while trying to read selected fields from a large BRFSS survey data file. Took a couple of hours to realize what was happening. The help page for read_fwf now says "The width of the last column will be silently extended to the next line break" so R reads the entire remainder of the line following what's supposed to be the last field. I don't understand the rationale for this change; the old behavior needs to be restored or an argument added to say "I'm done, go to the next line." |
A temporary workaround, is to first create the col_positions and then remove the column names that you don't need. fwf_sample <- system.file("extdata/fwf-sample.txt", package = "readr")
cat(read_lines(fwf_sample))
col_positions <- fwf_widths(c(2, 5, 3))
col_types <- 'd-d'
col_positions$col_names <- col_positions$col_names[!strsplit(col_types,'')[[1]] %in% c('_','-')]
read_fwf(fwf_sample,col_positions = col_positions ,col_types = col_types) Note that there are other issues with the read_fwf (See #300) that can be related. |
Deleted the irrelevant comments. Possibly related to #371 |
sorry if i'm misreading something. thanks!
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