title: How to get R to read multiple tables in one text file when the first table has less columns then other tables
body: <p>The data set I have been given is huge so I made a sample set.</p>
  
  <pre><code>text    bool
  H1  H2
  exTable1    0
  text    num num text
  HEAD1   HEAD2   HEAD3   HEAD4
  exTable2    098 987 exText1
  text    bool    text
  HEADER1 HEADER2 HEADER3
  exTable3    1   exText2
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>As you can see the tables are tab separated and each table is preceded by a line that describes the type of data in each column. I tried using the following code to read the table and take the headers from the second line:</p>
  
  <p><code>table1 &lt;- read.table("tables.txt", sep="\t", skip=1, header=TRUE)</code> </p>
  
  <p>I got this error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Error in read.table("tables.txt", sep = "\t",  : 
  more columns than column names
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That's when notice that there were multiple tables and that the first table has less columns then the rest.</p>