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Asked: 2026-06-12T00:09:54+00:00

I have a text data separated ny commas i.e.,. The sample of the data

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I have a text data separated ny “commas” i.e.”,”. The sample of the data is given below (first row indicates the column names):

userID,appName,startTime,endTime,endResult
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 02:47:16,2012-07-01 02:47:46,1
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 03:11:46,2012-07-01 03:12:25,2
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 03:13:36,2012-07-01 03:14:03,2
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 03:18:26,2012-07-01 03:18:58,2
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 04:10:36,2012-07-01 04:10:54,2
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 04:38:26,2012-07-01 04:38:48,2
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 04:48:56,2012-07-01 04:49:04,3
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 05:49:46,2012-07-01 05:50:14,2
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 06:19:07,2012-07-01 06:19:25,2
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 07:09:17,2012-07-01 07:09:47,2

I am using the following syntax:

appsession <- read.table("C:/.../AppSession.txt", sep = ",", 
  col.names = c("userID","appName","startTime","endTime","endResult"), 
  fill = FALSE, strip.white = TRUE)

I am getting this error:

Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  : 
  line 1 did not have 5 elements
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Using suitably edited version of your data (i.e. removing all the blank lines!), this can be loaded into R easily via read.csv(). Note here I’m using a text connection containing the data to avoid writing your data to a file. Just replace con with your file name in the read.csv().

    con <- textConnection("userID,appName,startTime,endTime,endResult
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 02:47:16,2012-07-01 02:47:46,1
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 03:11:46,2012-07-01 03:12:25,2
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 03:13:36,2012-07-01 03:14:03,2
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 03:18:26,2012-07-01 03:18:58,2
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 04:10:36,2012-07-01 04:10:54,2
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 04:38:26,2012-07-01 04:38:48,2
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 04:48:56,2012-07-01 04:49:04,3
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 05:49:46,2012-07-01 05:50:14,2
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 06:19:07,2012-07-01 06:19:25,2
chhieut,gms.mos.test,2012-07-01 07:09:17,2012-07-01 07:09:47,2
")

dat <- read.csv(con,
                colClasses = c(rep("character", 2), rep("POSIXct", 2),
                               "numeric"))
close(con) ## closing connection, not needed with a file

    Also note that by specifying the colclasses argument we tell R what the data are before reading them in which saves some formatting later, especially with the DateTime data. We can do this here because you have the DateTime variables stored in the correct format.

    R> head(dat)
   userID      appName           startTime             endTime endResult
1 chhieut gms.mos.test 2012-07-01 02:47:16 2012-07-01 02:47:46         1
2 chhieut gms.mos.test 2012-07-01 03:11:46 2012-07-01 03:12:25         2
3 chhieut gms.mos.test 2012-07-01 03:13:36 2012-07-01 03:14:03         2
4 chhieut gms.mos.test 2012-07-01 03:18:26 2012-07-01 03:18:58         2
5 chhieut gms.mos.test 2012-07-01 04:10:36 2012-07-01 04:10:54         2
6 chhieut gms.mos.test 2012-07-01 04:38:26 2012-07-01 04:38:48         2
R> str(dat)
'data.frame':   10 obs. of  5 variables:
 $ userID   : chr  "chhieut" "chhieut" "chhieut" "chhieut" ...
 $ appName  : chr  "gms.mos.test" "gms.mos.test" "gms.mos.test" "gms.mos.test" ...
 $ startTime: POSIXct, format: "2012-07-01 02:47:16" "2012-07-01 03:11:46" ...
 $ endTime  : POSIXct, format: "2012-07-01 02:47:46" "2012-07-01 03:12:25" ...
 $ endResult: num  1 2 2 2 2 2 3 2 2 2
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