r - How can I read the header but also skip lines - read.table()?

Question

Data.txt:

Index;Time;
1;2345;
2;1423;
3;5123;

The code:

dat <- read.table('data.txt', skip = 1, nrows = 2, header =TRUE, sep =';')

The result:

  X1 X2345
1  2  1423
2  3  5123

I expect the header to be Index and Time, as follows:

  Index Time
1   2   1423
2   3   5123

How do I do that?

Answer 1

I am afraid, that there is no direct way to achieve this. Either you read the entire table and remove afterwards the lines you don't want or you read in the table twice and assign the header later:

header <- read.table('data.txt', nrows = 1, header = FALSE, sep =';', stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
dat    <- read.table('data.txt', skip = 2, header = FALSE, sep =';')
colnames( dat ) <- unlist(header)