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I have problem with loading data into R:

fileUrl <- "http://jadi.net/files/iran_it_status_1394_detail_data_jadi_net.tsv"

download.file(fileUrl , destfile="iran_it_status_1394_detail_data_jadi_net.tsv")

dev <- read.delim("iran_it_status_1394_detail_data_jadi_net.tsv",
              header=TRUE,sep="\t",blank.lines.skip = TRUE,
              na.strings="",fileEncoding="UTF-8",
              stringsAsFactors=FALSE,skipNul = TRUE)

I receive the following error:

Error in read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote,  : 
  no lines available in input
  In addition: Warning message:
  In read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote,  :
  invalid input found on input connection    'iran_it_status_1394_detail_data_jadi_net.tsv'

Edit: The dataset has 1217 rows and 33 variables.

names(data) <- c("timestamp","age","sex","birth_province","work_province","experience","education",
            "certificate","learn","project","book","language","wish_language","db","desktop_os",
            "wish_os","mobile","env","theme","src_ctrl","tab_space","drink","items","device","title",
            "org_type","org_emp","income","perk","job_contract","job_type","hour_wage","happy")

for language variable I expect this output:

data[1:3,"language"]

C#, Javascript, R, SQL

Java, C#, Javascript, Objective C, Swift, SQL

C#, SQL

Python Solutions are also welcome

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  • $\begingroup$ I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because this is a simple R problem and not data science enough. $\endgroup$
    – Spacedman
    Commented Jun 24, 2016 at 12:13
  • $\begingroup$ Tough one; since R is so commonly used in data science, I could imagine some basic R questions being OK here, even if they might be somewhat better on Stack Overflow. $\endgroup$
    – Sean Owen
    Commented Jun 24, 2016 at 12:50
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @SeanOwen Useful criterion: If it might be useful to non data-science R users, it should go in Stack Overflow. There's not a single byte of data science in this question. Any R user might want to read a data file like this in. Hence close, move to stack overflow. $\endgroup$
    – Spacedman
    Commented Jun 26, 2016 at 10:43
  • $\begingroup$ Are there non-data-science R users? anything you'd do with R seems like part of data science to me. I think this is more on-topic for SO, but that's different from blocking it here. Some SEs overlap. People have to do stuff like this to do their data science work. $\endgroup$
    – Sean Owen
    Commented Jun 26, 2016 at 11:22

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I am able to load the data set like so:

 dev <- read.table("iran_it_status_1394_detail_data_jadi_net.tsv",
                   header=TRUE, sep="\t", blank.lines.skip = TRUE,
                   na.strings="",
                   stringsAsFactors=FALSE, skipNul = TRUE, fill=T, quote="")

Note the removal of the encoding (so that the function "finds" lines in the file), the fill attribute (to allow for a ragged table with empty cells), and the elimination of quotes (apparently there is a misquoted line somewhere near line 585).

This results in a table full of encoded characters - you'll need to know more about the source data to figure out how to work with it, but if you open the file up in a raw text editor (e.g.: Sublime text) you might get some clues:

Character encoding issues?

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  • $\begingroup$ Please see my edit. $\endgroup$
    – Hamideh
    Commented Jun 24, 2016 at 13:13
  • $\begingroup$ Yes, when using the read.table() call above I get 1217 observations of 33 variables $\endgroup$
    – Thomas Kiehne
    Commented Jun 24, 2016 at 16:52
  • $\begingroup$ The data is loaded by your script but there is a problem with one of my text variables: language . see my edit. $\endgroup$
    – Hamideh
    Commented Jun 25, 2016 at 15:56
  • $\begingroup$ It doesn't necessarily solve the character encoding issues, but I realized that "#" is the default comment character; comment processing should be ignored: dev <- read.table("iran_it_status_1394_detail_data_jadi_net.tsv", header=TRUE, sep="\t", na.strings="", encoding="UTF-8", stringsAsFactors=FALSE, skipNul = TRUE, fill=T, quote="", comment.char="") $\endgroup$
    – Thomas Kiehne
    Commented Jun 26, 2016 at 1:31
  • $\begingroup$ You are right. Now C# is read correctly but there are extra \" at the beginning and the end of my strings. $\endgroup$
    – Hamideh
    Commented Jun 27, 2016 at 15:18
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Try using eithertry or tryCatch:

See here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13613270/how-to-fix-the-error-in-r-of-no-lines-available-in-input

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  • $\begingroup$ I don't know how to integrate it with my code. $\endgroup$
    – Hamideh
    Commented Jun 24, 2016 at 13:16

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