如何将指定文本文件转换为R data.frame？读取时出现报错

That error pops up because the file you're trying to read doesn't use single spaces as consistent separators—fields like player names contain spaces themselves, so using sep=' ' splits those names into multiple columns, throwing off the column count vs. the header. Here are a few reliable fixes:

Option 1: Use data.table::fread (Most Hassle-Free) #

fread is great at auto-detecting messy separators, so it'll handle the mixed spacing in this file without extra configuration:

# Install and load the package if you haven't already
install.packages("data.table")
library(data.table)

# Read the data
y <- fread("https://afltables.com/afl/stats/biglists/bg2.txt", skip = 1)

Option 2: Adjust read.table Parameters #

If you prefer base R, tweak the sep argument to let R handle multiple spaces as a single separator, and add fill=TRUE to account for any minor row inconsistencies:

y <- read.table("https://afltables.com/afl/stats/biglists/bg2.txt", 
                skip = 1, 
                header = TRUE, 
                sep = "",  # Treats one or more spaces/tabs as a separator
                stringsAsFactors = FALSE,  # Keeps text as character strings (modern default in R 4.0+)
                fill = TRUE)

Option 3: Use readr::read_table #

The readr package (part of the tidyverse) also handles whitespace-separated files smoothly:

install.packages("readr")
library(readr)

y <- read_table("https://afltables.com/afl/stats/biglists/bg2.txt", skip = 1)

Why Your Original Code Failed #

When you set sep=' ', R interprets every single space as a column separator. Since player names (like "Gary Ablett Sr.") have spaces inside them, this splits one name field into multiple columns, making the number of elements in rows like line 3 not match the 30 columns defined by the header. Using a separator that accounts for multiple spaces (or letting auto-detect tools do the work) fixes this.

内容的提问来源于stack exchange，提问作者Harpreet Singh