Error in R reading data: "Line is too short for rectype."

1

Hi there,

I’m facing an error after running the provided code:

ddi <- read_ipums_ddi("ipumsi_00006.xml")
data <- read_ipums_micro(ddi)

"Error: Line is too short for rectype."

Interestingly, I do not encounter this error when executing the same code on a different computer. However, I need this code to work on a computer with larger RAM, which has proven to be challenging so far. I suspect that it might be related to package conflicts, but I haven’t been able to identify the solution to fix this error yet. Also, this error comes usually when the data to be loaded is very large…

Any assistance or insights into resolving this issue would be greatly appreciated!

2

Hi Rodrigo, thanks for posting your issue! With the help of our IT folks here, I created an extract matching the specifications of your IPUMSI extract #6, but I wasn’t able to replicate your error with the latest version of ipumsr (0.6.0).

One possible reason for the error you’re seeing is that the data file didn’t finish downloading and you have an incomplete data file on the computer where you’re getting the error. This seems plausible given the size of your extract – it looks like the extracted data contain 453 million records! You could test this theory by redownloading the extract data file, or copying the version of the data file from the computer where you are able to read the data to the computer where it’s not working.

If that approach doesn’t solve the problem, the error could result from something specific to your R installation. In that case, could you share the output of devtools::session_info() so that we can try to replicate your setup to trace the source of the issue?

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