read.table returns extra rows - r

Question

I am working with textfiles of many, long rows with varying number of elements. Each element in the rows are separated by \t and of course the rows are terminated by \n. I'm using read.table to read the textfiles. An example samplefile is this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6utslbnwerwhi58/samplefile.txt
The sample file has 60 rows.
Code to read the file:
sampleData <- read.table("samplefile.txt", as.is=TRUE, fill = TRUE);
dim(sampleData);
The dim returns 70 rows when in fact it should be 60. When I try nrows=60 like
sampleData <- read.table("samplefile.txt", as.is=TRUE, fill = TRUE, nrows = 60);
dim(sampleData);
it does work, however, I don't know if doing so will delete some of the information. My suspicion is that the last portions of some of the rows are added to new rows. I don't know why that would be the case, however, as I have fill = TRUE;
I have also tried
na.strings = "NA", fill=TRUE, strip.white=TRUE, blank.lines.skip =
TRUE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE, quote = "", comment.char = ""
but to no avail.
Does anyone have any idea what might be going on?

Answer 1

In the absence of a reproducible example, try something like this:
# Make some fake data
R <- c("1 2 3 4","2 3 4","4 5 6 7 8")
writeLines(R, "samplefile.txt")
# read line by line
r <- readLines("samplefile.txt")
# split by sep
sp <- strsplit(r, " ")
# Make each into a list of dataframes (for rbind.fill)
sp <- lapply(sp, function(x)as.data.frame(t(x)))
# now bind
library(plyr)
rbind.fill(sp)
If this is similar to your actual problem, anyway.