I'm trying to read in a .csv file from the IRS and it doesn't appear to be formatted in any weird way.
I'm using the read.table() function, which I have used several times in the past but it isn't working this time; instead, I get this error:
data_0910<-read.table("/Users/blahblahblah/countyinflow0910.csv",header=T,stringsAsFactors=FALSE,colClasses="character")
Error in read.table("/Users/blahblahblah/countyinflow0910.csv", :
more columns than column names
Why is it doing this?
For reference, the .csv files can be found at:
http://www.irs.gov/uac/SOI-Tax-Stats-County-to-County-Migration-Data-Files
(The ones I need are under the county to county migration .csv section - either inflow or outflow.)
It uses commas as separators. So you can either set sep="," or just use read.csv:
x <- read.csv(file="http://www.irs.gov/file_source/pub/irs-soi/countyinflow1011.csv")
dim(x)
## [1] 113593 9
The error is caused by spaces in some of the values, and unmatched quotes. There are no spaces in the header, so read.table thinks that there is one column. Then it thinks it sees multiple columns in some of the rows. For example, the first two lines (header and first row):
State_Code_Dest,County_Code_Dest,State_Code_Origin,County_Code_Origin,State_Abbrv,County_Name,Return_Num,Exmpt_Num,Aggr_AGI
00,000,96,000,US,Total Mig - US & For,6973489,12948316,303495582
And unmatched quotes, for example on line 1336 (row 1335) which will confuse read.table with the default quote argument (but not read.csv):
01,089,24,033,MD,Prince George's County,13,30,1040
you have have strange characters in your heading # % -- or ,
For the Germans:
you have to change your decimal commas into a Full stop in your csv-file (in Excel:File -> Options -> Advanced -> "Decimal seperator") , then the error is solved.
Depending on the data (e.g. tsv extension) it may use tab as separators, so you may try sep = '\t' with read.csv.
This error can get thrown if your data frame has sf geometry columns.
Related
Update 2020-5-14
Working with a different but similar dataset from here, I found read_csv seems to work fine. I haven't tried it with the original data yet though.
Although the replies didn't help solve the problem because my question was not correct, Shan's reply fits the original question I posted the most, so I accepted his answer.
Update 2020-5-12
I think my original question is not correct. Like mentioned in the comment, the data was quoted. Although changing the separator made the 11582 row in R look the same as the 11583 row in excel, it doesn't mean it's "right". Maybe there is some incorrect line switch due to inappropriate encoding or something, and thus causing some of the columns to be displaced. If I open the data with notepad++, the instance at row 11583 in excel is at the 11596 row.
Original question
I am trying to read the listings.csv from this dataset in kaggle into R. I downloaded the file and wrote the coderead.csv('listing.csv'). The first column, the column id, is supposed to be numeric. However, it shows:
listing$id[1:10]
[1] 2015 2695 3176 3309 7071 9991 14325 16401 16644 17409
13129 Levels: Ole Berl穩n!,16736423,Nerea,Mitte,Parkviertel,52.55554132116211,13.340658248460871,Entire home/apt,36,6,3,2018-01-26,0.16,1,279\n17312576,Great 2 floor apartment near Friederich Str MITTE,116829651,Selin,Mitte,Alexanderplatz,52.52349354926847,13.391003496971203,Entire home/apt,170,3,31,2018-10-13,1.63,1,92\n17316675,80簡 m of charm in 3 rooms with office space,116862833,Jon,Neuk繹lln,Schillerpromenade,52.47499080234379,13.427509313575928...
I think it is because there are values with commas in the second column. For example, opening the file with MiCrosoft excel, I can see one of the value in the second column is Ole,Ole...:
How can I read a csv file into R correctly when some values contain commas?
Since you have access to the data in Excel, you can 'Save As' in Excel with a seperator other than comma (,). First go in to Control Panel –> Region and Language -> Additional settings, you can change the "List Seperator". Most common one other than comma is pipe symbol (|). In R, when you read_csv, specify the seperator as '|'.
You could try this?
lsitings <- read.csv("listings.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
listings$name <- gsub(",","", listings$name) - This will remove the comma in Col name
If you don't need the information in the second column, then you can always delete it (in Excel) before importing into R. The read.csv function, which calls scan, can also omit unwanted columns using the colClasses argument. However, the fread function from the data.table package does this much more simply with the drop argument:
library(data.table)
listings <- fread("listings.csv", drop=2)
If you do need the information in that column, then other methods are needed (see other solutions).
I have got this .txt file outputed by a microscope to process.
#read the .txt file generated by microscope, skipping the first 9 lines of garbage information
df <- read.csv("Objects_Population - AllCells.txt", sep="\t", skip = 9,header=TRUE, fill = T)
Then I started looking at the structure of the dataframe, everything seems fine except I now found an extra column in the end of the data frame named "x.1" and all rows of it are NA values. I don't see this column when I open the .txt file in excel. I suspect the problem has something to do with the column names generated by microscope, they contain quite some special characters
Below is the dataframe read by Excel(only showing the last 2 columns since I have 132 columns, and their names are disgustingly long):
AllCells - Cell Contact Area with Neighbors [%] AllCells - Nucleus Nearest Neighbor Distance [µm]
0 4.82083
21.9512 0
15.7895 0
29.4118 0.584611
0 4.21569
0 1.99599
0 3.50767
...
This has happened to me before but I never took it too serious as I was always interested in a subset of my data frame. Now I'm looking at all columns then this starts to bothering me.
Is there any way I can read them correctly without R attaching that additional "X.1" column in the end? Preferably not manually delete or subset out the last column...
Cheers,
ML
If all other column names are correct, you have probably a trailing \t in the text file. R tries to include it and gives it the generic column name X.1.
You could try and read the file first as 'plain text' and remove the trailing \t and only then use read.csv:
file_connection <- file("Objects_Population - AllCells.txt")
content <- readLines(file_connection )
close(file_connection)
Now we try to get rid of these trailing \t (this might need some testing to fit your needs)
sanitized <- gsub("\\t$", "", content)
And then we read this sanitized string as if it was a file (using the argument text)
df <- read.csv(text=paste0(sanitized, collapse="\n"), sep="\t", skip = 9,header=TRUE, fill = T)
Had that problem too. Fixed it by saving the file as "CSV (MS-DOS (*csv)" instead of what I originally had as "CSV (Comma delimited)(*csv)".
This is almost certainly because you've got an extra empty column in your spreadsheet.
In Excel, open your sheet and press Ctrl-End. If you end up in an empty cell outside the range of your data, there's the problem. Select the column (Ctrl-Space), right-click, and choose Delete.
I also encountered similar problem. I found that three extra columns were created (X, X.1, X.2), after I loaded dataset from excel sheet to R studio.
Steps Followed by me:
a) I went to the excel sheet and selected those three extra columns after last column with actual values in excel sheet. Selected extra 3 columns by keeping cursor on top of columns and then right click the mouse and select delete.
b) Again loaded that excel sheet in R. I did not find those 3 columns.
TL;DR
I have a snippet of text
str <- '"foo\\dar embedded \\\"quote\\\""'
# cat(str, '\n') # gives
# "foo\dar embedded \"quote\""
# i.e. as if the above had been written to a CSV with quoting turned on.
I want to end up with the string:
str <- 'foo\\dar embedded "quote"'
# cat(str, '\n') # gives
# foo\dar embedded "quote"
essentially removing one "layer" of quoting. How may I do this?
(Initial attempt -- eval(parse(text=str)), which works unless you have something like \\dar, where you get the error "\d is an unrecognized escape in character string ...").
Gory details (optional)
The reason my strings are quoted once-too-many times is I kludged some data processing -- I wrote str (well, a dataframe in my case) to a table with quoting enabled, but forgot that many of the columns in my dataframe had embedded newlines with embedded quotes (i.e. forgot to escape/remove them).
It turns out that when I read.table a file with multiple columns in the same row that have embedded newlines and embedded quotes (or something like that), the function fails (fair enough).
I had since closed my R session so my only access to my data was through my munged CSV. So I wrote some spaghetti code to simply readLines my CSV and split everything up to reconstruct my dataframe again. However, since all my character columns were quoted in the CSV, I have a few columns in my restored dataframe that are still quoted that I want to unquote.
Messy, I know. I'll remember to save an original version of the data next time (save, saveRDS).
For those interested, the header row and three rows of my CSV are shown below (all the characters are ASCII)
"quote";"id";"date";"author";"context"
"< mwk> I tried to fix the bug I mentioned, but I accidentally ascended the character I started for testing... hoped she'd die soon and I could get to coding, but alas I was wrong";"< mwk> I tried to fix the bug I mentioned, but I accidentally ascended the character I started for testing... hoped she'd die soon and I could get to coding, but alas I was wrong";"February 28, 2013";"nhqdb";"nhqdb"
"< intx14> \"A gush of water hits the air elemental on the central core!\"
< intx14> What is this, a weather forecast?";"< intx14> \"A gush of water hits the air elemental on the central core!\"
< intx14> What is this, a weather forecast?";"February 28, 2013";"nhqdb";"nhqdb"
"< bcode> n - a spherical amulet. You are lucky! Full moon tonight.
< bcode> That must be a sign - I'll put it on! What could possibly go wrong...
< oracle\devnull> DIED : bcode2 (Wiz-Elf-Mal-Cha) 0 points, killed by strangulation on pcs1.nethack.devnull.net";"< bcode> n - a spherical amulet. You are lucky! Full moon tonight.
< bcode> That must be a sign - I'll put it on! What could possibly go wrong...
< oracle\devnull> DIED : bcode2 (Wiz-Elf-Mal-Cha) 0 points, killed by strangulation on pcs1.nethack.devnull.net";"February 28, 2013";"nhqdb";"nhqdb"
The first two columns of each row are the same, being the quote (the first row has no embedded newlines in the quote; the second and third do). Separator is ';'.
> read.table('test.csv', sep=';', header=T)
Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings, :
line 1 did not have 5 elements
# same for with ,allowEscape=T
Use regular expressions:
str <- gsub('^"|"$', '', gsub('\\\"', '"', str, fixed = TRUE))
[EDIT 3: the OP has posted three separate versions of this - two of them irreproducible, interspersed with complaining. Due to this timewasting behavior and several people downvoting, I'm leaving the original answer to version 2 of the question.]
EDIT 1: My solution to the second version of the OP's question was this:
txt <- read.csv('escaped.csv', header=T, allowEscapes=T, sep=';')
EDIT 2: We now get a third version. Finally some reproducible code after 36 minutes asking and waiting. Due to the behavior of the OP and other posters I'm not inclined to waste more time on this. I'm going to complain about both of your behavior on MSO. Downvote yourselves silly.
ORIGINAL:
gsub is the ugly way.
Use read.csv(..., allowEscapes=TRUE, quote=..., encoding=...) arguments. See the manpage, section on Encoding
If you want actual code, you need to give us a full line or two of your CSV file.
See also SO: "How to detect the right encoding for read.csv?"
Quoting the relevant part of your question:
The reason my strings are quoted once-too-many times is I kludged some
data processing -- I wrote str (well, a dataframe in my case) to a
table with quoting enabled, but forgot that many of the columns in my
dataframe had embedded newlines within quotes (i.e. forgot to
escape/remove them).
It turns out that when I read.table a file with multiple columns in
the same row that have embedded newlines within quotes, the function
fails (fair enough).
I am trying to load a csv file that has 14 columns like this:
StartDate, var1, var2, var3, ..., var14
when I issue this command:
systems <- read.table("http://getfile.pl?test.csv", header = TRUE, sep = ",")
I get an error message.
duplicate row.names are not allowed
It seems to me that the first column name is causing the issue. When I manually download the file and remove the StartDate name from the file, R successfully reads the file and replaces the first column name with X. Can someone tell me what is going on? The file is a (comma separated) csv file.
Then tell read.table not to use row.names:
systems <- read.table("http://getfile.pl?test.csv",
header=TRUE, sep=",", row.names=NULL)
and now your rows will simply be numbered.
Also look at read.csv which is a wrapper for read.table which already sets the sep=',' and header=TRUE arguments so that your call simplifies to
systems <- read.csv("http://getfile.pl?test.csv", row.names=NULL)
This related question points out a part of the ?read.table documentation that explains your problem:
If there is a header and the first row contains one fewer field
than the number of columns, the first column in the input is used
for the row names. Otherwise if row.names is missing, the rows are numbered.
Your header row likely has 1 fewer column than the rest of the file and so read.table assumes that the first column is the row.names (which must all be unique), not a column (which can contain duplicated values). You can fix this by using one of the following two Solutions:
adding a delimiter (ie \t or ,) to the front or end of your header row in the source file, or,
removing any trailing delimiters in your data
The choice will depend on the structure of your data.
Example:
Here the header row is interpreted as having one fewer column than the data because the delimiters don't match:
v1,v2,v3 # 3 items!!
a1,a2,a3, # 4 items
b1,b2,b3, # 4 items
This is how it is interpreted by default:
v1,v2,v3 # 3 items!!
a1,a2,a3, # 4 items
b1,b2,b3, # 4 items
The first column (with no header) values are interpreted as row.names: a1 and b1. If this column contains duplicates, which is entirely possible, then you get the duplicate 'row.names' are not allowed error.
If you set row.names = FALSE, the shift doesn't happen, but you still have a mismatching number of items in the header and in the data because the delimiters don't match.
Solution 1
Add trailing delimiter to header:
v1,v2,v3, # 4 items!!
a1,a2,a3, # 4 items
b1,b2,b3, # 4 items
Solution 2
Remove excess trailing delimiter from non-header rows:
v1,v2,v3 # 3 items
a1,a2,a3 # 3 items!!
b1,b2,b3 # 3 items!!
In my case was a comma at the end of every line. By removing that worked
I had this error when opening a CSV file and one of the fields had commas embedded in it. The field had quotes around it, and I had cut and paste the read.table with quote="" in it. Once I took quote="" out, the default behavior of read.table took over and killed the problem. So I went from this:
systems <- read.table("http://getfile.pl?test.csv", header=TRUE, sep=",", quote="")
to this:
systems <- read.table("http://getfile.pl?test.csv", header=TRUE, sep=",")
I used read_csv from the readr package
In my experience, the parameter row.names=NULL in the read.csv function will lead to a wrong reading of the
file if a column name is missing, i.e. every column will be shifted.
read_csv solves this.
Another possible reason for this error is that you have entire rows duplicated. If that is the case, the problem is solved by removing the duplicate rows.
The answer here (https://stackoverflow.com/a/22408965/2236315) by #adrianoesch should help (e.g., solves "If you know of a solution that does not require the awkward workaround mentioned in your comment (shift the column names, copy the data), that would be great." and "...requiring that the data be copied" proposed by #Frank).
Note that if you open in some text editor, you should see that the number of header fields less than number of columns below the header row. In my case, the data set had a "," missing at the end of the last header field.
It seems the problem can arise from more than one reasons. Following two steps worked when I was having same error.
I saved my file as MS-DOS csv. ( Earlier it was saved in as just csv , excel starter 2010 ).
Opened the csv in notepad++. No coma was inconsistent (consistency as described above #Brian).
Noticed I was not using argument sep="," . I used and it worked ( even though that is default argument!)
I have a csv file with ~200 columns and ~170K rows. The data has been extensively groomed and I know that it is well-formed. When read.table completes, I see that approximately half of the rows have been imported. There are no warnings nor errors. I set options( warn = 2 ). I'm using 64-bit latest version and I increased the memory limit to 10gig. Scratching my head here...no idea how to proceed debugging this.
Edit
When I said half the file, I don't mean the first half. The last observation read is towards the end of the file....so its seemingly random.
You may have a comment character (#) in the file (try setting the option comment.char = "" in read.table). Also, check that the quote option is set correctly.
I've had this problem before how I approached it was to read in a set number of lines at a time and then combine after the fact.
df1 <- read.csv(..., nrows=85000)
df2 <- read.csv(..., skip=84999, nrows=85000)
colnames(df1) <- colnames(df2)
df <- rbind(df1,df2)
rm(df1,df2)
I had a similar problem when reading in a large txt file which had a "|" separator. Scattered about the txt file were some text blocks that contained a quote (") which caused the read.xxx function to stop at the prior record without throwing an error. Note that the text blocks mentioned were not encased in double quotes; rather, they just contained one double quote character here and there (") which tripped it up.
I did a global search and replace on the txt file, replacing the double quote (") with a single quote ('), solving the problem (all rows were then read in without aborting).