rowvar import error in R

Question

I am trying to import a .csv file into R with:

mydata <- read.table("c:/data.csv", header=TRUE, sep=",", row.names="id")

But keep getting:

Error in data[[rowvar]] : attempt to select less than one element

The .csv file looks like:

Title1,Title2,Title3
1,2,3
4,5,6
7,8,9

Any help would be much appreciated!

Solution 1

The row.names argument should be a vector which has the length of the number of rows. Simply omitting the argument for now would probably fix the issue. The documentation is clear about row.names being a vector, although raising a more informative exception would be nice.

Solution 2

mydata <- read.csv("c:/mydata.csv")

Use the read.csv function instead. It auto popoulates the column headers based on the values in the first row.

Comments

[bearvarine]

row.names, if included, needs to be one of the header field names. You put row.names="id" but you don't have an "id" field name. Either add another field that will name each row (e.g. names of States, etc.) or just omit the argument. Agree that the error message is useless.