r - Any way to force fread() of data.table not to stop on empty lines?

Question

(question is not relevant anymore, since new version of data.table of 25-NOV-2016 - see accepted answer below)

So, I have a table with some empty lines in the middle. When I try to open it with fread, it stops, saying Stopped reading at empty line 10006, but text exists afterwards (discarded). Is there any way to avoid this without changing the data file?

Answer 1

Version 1.9.8 of data.table, released 25-NOV-2016, has a new blank.lines.skip option to skip blank lines.

text <- "1,a

2,b
3,c
4,a

5,b

6,c"

library(data.table)
fread(text)
##    V1 V2
## 1:  2  b
## 2:  3  c
## 3:  4  a
## Warning message:
## In fread("1,a

2,b
3,c
4,a

5,b

6,c") :
##   Stopped reading at empty line 6 but text exists afterwards (discarded): 5,b

fread(text, blank.lines.skip=TRUE)
##    V1 V2
## 1:  1  a
## 2:  2  b
## 3:  3  c
## 4:  4  a
## 5:  5  b
## 6:  6  c