Question

There is a strange thing when i use read.table to get data.

data=read.table('/home/tiger/nasdaqlisted.txt',head=T,sep='|')
dim(data)
[1] 750   6

in fact,there are 2454 lines in the file,what’s wrong?
http://freeuploadfiles.com/bb3cwypih2d2

Answer 1

I think the issue comes from the fact that some of the names contain the quote character ' (in names such as Angie's List, Inc.).
The default argument in read.table for quote being "\"'" it needs to be changed for your data to be read correctly.

read.table("path/to/file", header=TRUE, sep="|", quote="")

As per @mrdwab suggestion, read.delim having "\"" as default quote argument will work without needing any change:

read.delim("path/to/file", header=TRUE, sep="|")