How to delete a row in a csv file with powershell in R? - r

Question

Good morning,
I'm new about powershell and I'd like to ask you if somebody can help me.
I have a big csv file around 3.5gb and my goal is to load it with fread (a data.table function) in R environment, but this function makes a error.
> n_a<-fread("C:/x/xy/xyz/name_file.csv",sep=";", fill = TRUE)
The error is:
Warning message:
In fread("C:/x/xy/xyz/name_file.csv") :
Stopped early on line 458945. Expected 29 fields but found 30. Consider fill=TRUE and comment.char=. First discarded non-empty line
I tried to use different way (I putted in my code fill=true, but doesn't work) to solve the problem, but I couldn't do it.
After different researches I found this kind of solution (always to do in R):
>system("powershell Get-Content C:/a/b/c/file.csv | Select -Index (0..458944 + 1000000) > output.csv")
The focus about the use of powershell in R is to delete a specific row and to load with fread the file.
My question is:
How I can delete a specific row in a csv in powershell but without specifying the length of the matrix?
Thank you in advance for every type of help.
Francesco

Answer 1

I'd hazard a guess that the invalid row's location is not known. In such a case, it might be sensible to read the original file and create a new file that contains only valid data. What's more, if the source data would benefit of manipulation, it can be done before reading it into R.
A file as large as 3,5 GiB is a bit on the large side to read in memory as such. Sure, it can be done in the days of 64 bit systems, but for simple row processing it's unwieldy. A scalable solution uses .Net methods and row-by-row approach.
To process a file on row-by-row basis, use .Net methods for efficient row reading. A StringBuilder is created to store rows that contain valid data, others are discarded. The StringBuilder is flushed on disk every so often. Even on days of SSDs, a write operation for each row is relatively slow in respect to writing in a bulk of, say, 10 000 rows a time.
$sb = New-Object Text.StringBuilder
$reader = [IO.File]::OpenText("MyCsvFile.csv")
$i = 0
$MaxRows = 10000
$colonCount = 30
while($null -ne ($line = $reader.ReadLine())) {
# Split the line on semicolons
$elements = $line -split ';'
# If there were $colonCount elements, add those to builder
if($elements.count -eq $colonCount) {
# If $line's contents need modifications, do it here
# before adding it into the builder
[void]$sb.AppendLine($line)
++$i
}
# Write builder contents into file every now and then
if($i -ge $MaxRows) {
add-content "MyCleanCsvFile.csv" $sb.ToString()
[void]$sb.Clear()
$i = 0
}
}
# Flush the builder after the loop if there's data
if($sb.Length -gt 0) {
add-content "MyCleanCsvFile.csv" $sb.ToString()
}

Answer 2

This is easy done in powershell: Read csv in generic list, remove line and write back:
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Collections
[System.Collections.Generic.List[string]]$csvList = #()
$csvFile = 'C:\test\myfile.csv'
$csvList = [System.IO.File]::ReadLines( $csvFile )
$lineToDelete = 2
[void]$csvList.RemoveAt( $lineToDelete - 1 )
[System.IO.File]::WriteAllLines( $csvFile, $csvList ) | Out-Null

Answer 3

vonPryz's helpful answer offers the best solution, given the size of your input file.
The following works too, but will be slow - in general, due to the overhead of using a pipeline, but also because Get-Content itself is slow due to decorating each line read with additional properties (see green-lighted, but not yet implemented GitHub suggestion #7537):
# Exclude line number 458945 (0-based index 458944)
Get-Content C:/a/b/c/file.csv | Select-Object -SkipIndex 458944 > output.csv
The beneficial flip side of use of the pipeline is that it acts as a memory throttle, so the above command can be used to process arbitrarily large files (though it may take a long time).