Question

I have a data set that should contain 14 columns, but when I read it into R it presents as two columns, with the latter columns reading in as one, and are all separated by “.”

I read in using:

dat <- read.table (“/data/GER.female.RAWMACH”, header = F, sep = “\t”)

Below I have provided the output:

head (dat)

V1
TRAIT
CASE
CASE
CASE
CASE
CASE
CASE

V2
MARKER……….ALLELES..FREQ1….RSQR…EFFECT1..OR……STDERR..WALDCHISQ.PVALUE…..LRCHISQ.LRPVAL.NCASES.NCONTROLS
rs7 T A .9104 .0001 -3.944 0.019 19.634 0.0403 0.8408 0.0403 0.8409 260 446

rs6 A C .9114 .0002 -2.552 0.078 14.349 0.0316 0.8589 0.0316 0.8589 260 446

rs9 C T .8444 .0001 2.772 15.985 15.076
0.0338 0.8541 0.0338 0.8542 260 446

rs5 G A .9164 .0001 -3.683 0.025 18.039 0.0417 0.8382 0.0417
0.8383 260 446

rs2 T C .5168 .0001 -2.466 0.085 10.811 0.0520 0.8195 0.0520 0.8196 260 446

rs1 T G .8229 .0002 -1.727 0.178 12.241 0.0199 0.8878 0.0199 0.8878 260 446

I have tried a few things (rewriting the table, colsplit) with no success. What am I missing?

I appreciate any suggestions you may have!

Answer 1

You thought you had a tab separated file, but it wasn’t. You also DO have a header. Just use the default white-space separator by dropping the sep="\t" and setting header=TRUE.