fread skip doesn't get the header names.

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#2,080 8 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
r
Domain
data

Research direction

Start by reproducing the reported behavior with fread using skip and a file whose first line contains column names. Compare the result with the two-pass workaround described in the issue, and determine the intended interaction between skip and header detection. Done means skipped data rows are omitted while the requested first-line column names remain available.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement fread

When you use fread with the option skip= the file is read skipping the first lines...
That's OK, but there is a small problem, the first line contains the header, and you end up having no column names in your data.table.
I solve the problem using fread twice. By first reading only the first line and saving its content, and later reading the file again skiping as desired, and the renaming the columns.

I think it would be a good idea if fread always read the first line and use it as column names in case you decided so and no matter the skip value.

Dominant language
R
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Merged PRs (30d)
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