Reading text file with multiple space as delimiter in R

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You need to change your delimiter. " " refers to one whitespace character. "" refers to any length whitespace as being the delimiter

 data <- read.table(file, sep = "" , header = F , nrows = 100,
                     na.strings ="", stringsAsFactors= F)

From the manual:

If sep = “” (the default for read.table) the separator is ‘white space’, that is one or more spaces, tabs, newlines or carriage returns.

Also, with a large datafile you may want to consider data.table:::fread to quickly read data straight into a data.table. I was myself using this function this morning. It is still experimental, but I find it works very well indeed.

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