I’m trying to read a .dat data file from an NGHIS extract into R using read_nhgis. I extracted my download using 7-Zip, as I saw recommended in other answers. Regardless, when I try to read in the .dat file, it doesn’t correctly find column delineators and shows up as a data frame with 1 variable. I’d appreciate suggestions regarding how I can fix this.
I am not certain of the core issue here, but it sounds like the .dat file may not be comma delimited. This is the necessary format for the read_nhgis function to work properly. More documentation is available here.