title: Can you specify the number of columns in read.table?
body: <p>I am trying to automate the reading in of files generated from another analysis program.</p>
  
  <p>The standard output is typically in 6 columns separated by spaces with a carriage return at the end.
  This reads in nicely by simply using "strip.white = TRUE" in "read.table."</p>
  
  <p>I'm having a problem, however, b/c an annotation is added to a line if a parameter was fixed as a constant.<br>
  Adding "flush = TRUE" allows me to skip over these occasional comments and read everything in. </p>
  
  <p>What I would like to do is have these comments, which might only occur once in a given file,
  be added as a 7th column.</p>
  
  <p>Is there read-in approach that allows me to specify the number of columns or some other way of 
  accomadating this 7th column?</p>
  
  <p>A snippet of data can be found <a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/54791824/SO_data_frag.txt" rel="nofollow">here</a></p>
  
  <p>The data look like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>columns_1&amp;2  column_3  column_4  column_6  column_6   column_7     
  84:S 0:dorm  1.0000000 0.11E-005 0.9999979 1.0000021                           
  85:p N:veg   1.0000000 0.0000000 1.0000000 1.0000000  Fixed               
  86:p 0:dorm  0.260E-08 0.237E-05 -0.03E-05 0.46E-005
  </code></pre>