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

Here is a function to read in headers over multiple lines, largely based on Gavin Simpson's excellent answer.

The function defaults to comma separated values and two lines of header, and returns a data.frame with the first line in the file as header.

The function:

read.multi.line.header <- function(path, header.lines = 2, sep = ","){

  header <- scan(path, nlines = 1, what = character(), sep = sep)

  data <- read.table(path, skip = header.lines, header = FALSE, sep = sep)

  base::names(data) <- header

  return(data)
}

Produces:

mydata <- read.multi.line.header(path = "data.txt")

> head(mydata)
      trt      biomass      yield
1      C2        17.76     205.92
2      C2        17.96     207.86
3      CC        17.72     197.22
4      CC        18.42     205.20
5     CCW        18.15     200.51
6     CCW        17.45     190.59