Only read selected columns

by

Say the data are in file data.txt, you can use the colClasses argument of read.table() to skip columns. Here the data in the first 7 columns are "integer" and we set the remaining 6 columns to "NULL" indicating they should be skipped

> read.table("data.txt", colClasses = c(rep("integer", 7), rep("NULL", 6)), 
+            header = TRUE)
  Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun
1 2009 -41 -27 -25 -31 -31 -39
2 2010 -41 -27 -25 -31 -31 -39
3 2011 -21 -27  -2  -6 -10 -32

Change "integer" to one of the accepted types as detailed in ?read.table depending on the real type of data.

data.txt looks like this:

$ cat data.txt 
"Year" "Jan" "Feb" "Mar" "Apr" "May" "Jun" "Jul" "Aug" "Sep" "Oct" "Nov" "Dec"
2009 -41 -27 -25 -31 -31 -39 -25 -15 -30 -27 -21 -25
2010 -41 -27 -25 -31 -31 -39 -25 -15 -30 -27 -21 -25
2011 -21 -27 -2 -6 -10 -32 -13 -12 -27 -30 -38 -29

and was created by using

write.table(dat, file = "data.txt", row.names = FALSE)

where dat is

dat <- structure(list(Year = 2009:2011, Jan = c(-41L, -41L, -21L), Feb = c(-27L, 
-27L, -27L), Mar = c(-25L, -25L, -2L), Apr = c(-31L, -31L, -6L
), May = c(-31L, -31L, -10L), Jun = c(-39L, -39L, -32L), Jul = c(-25L, 
-25L, -13L), Aug = c(-15L, -15L, -12L), Sep = c(-30L, -30L, -27L
), Oct = c(-27L, -27L, -30L), Nov = c(-21L, -21L, -38L), Dec = c(-25L, 
-25L, -29L)), .Names = c("Year", "Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", 
"May", "Jun", "Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov", "Dec"), class = "data.frame",
row.names = c(NA, -3L))

If the number of columns is not known beforehand, the utility function count.fields will read through the file and count the number of fields in each line.

## returns a vector equal to the number of lines in the file
count.fields("data.txt", sep = "\t")
## returns the maximum to set colClasses
max(count.fields("data.txt", sep = "\t"))

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