Question

I have been struggling to make my R program print to a file. I have tried write, write.table, writeLines and cat but all to no avail, and I was hoping that someone could tell me where I am going wrong here.
Here is one attempt:

cat(searchn, file = "output.txt", sep = " ")

And here is another:

write.table(searchn, file = "output.txt", row.names = FALSE,
            append = FALSE, col.names = TRUE, sep = " ")

But they all just end up with empty files. I know that searchn has an actual value though:

head(searchn)
factor(0)
1253 Levels: 1:12 1:56 ... X:93

Because of the fact the searchn has data in it, I am inclined to think that it is just a problem in my line of code that attempts to write to the file. Although I don’t know what factor(0) means and a quick google search didn’t turn much up. I would welcome an explanation on that front even if it is not causing my troubles.
Does anyone see what I am doing wrong here?

Answer 1

Your object searchn contains no values. I know that because the result of head(searchn) is:

factor(0)

which means you have a factor of length zero, i.e. it’s empty.

Although the object is empty, it still contains meta-information about the factor levels, for example. So printing this meta-information should work without a problem. For example, try:

cat(levels(searchn), file="output.txt")