Reading two-line headers in R

Question

What is the best way to read a file into R when the header has two necessary lines for the header?

This happens to me all the time, as people often use one line for

Answer 1

A slightly different explained step by step approach:

1. Read only the first two lines of the files as data (without headers):

   headers <- read.table("data.txt", nrows=2, header=FALSE)
   

2. Create the headers names with the two (or more) first rows, sappy allows to make operations over the columns (in this case paste) - read more about sapply here :

   headers_names <- sapply(headers,paste,collapse="_")
   

3. Read the data of the files (skipping the first 2 rows):

   data <- read.csv(file="data.txt", skip = 2, header=FALSE)
   

4. And assign the headers of step two to the data:

   names(data) <- headers_names
   

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The advantage is that you would have clear control of the the parameters of read.table (such as sep for commas, and stringAsFactors - for both the headers and the data)