title: R: read .tab files
body: <p>I am trying to import a .tab file into R but one of the rows has an unexpected number of elements which gives me an error.  </p>
  
  <pre><code>data &lt;- read.table(functions.tab, header = F, sep = "\t")
  Error in scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = quote, dec = dec, : line 397 did not have 4 elements
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What is the best way around this so I don't lose any information? Is there a way to merge the overflow elements into the last column? </p>