Error saying names attribute 27 must be the same length as the vector 21

Question

I'm running into a problem when trying to use the readHTMLTable function in the R package XML. When running

library(XML)
baseurl <- "http://www.pro-football-reference.com/teams/"
team <- "nwe"
year <- 2011
theurl <- paste(baseurl,team,"/",year,".htm",sep="")

readurl <- getURL(theurl)
readtable <- readHTMLTable(readurl)

I get the error message:

Error in names(ans) = header : 
'names' attribute [27] must be the same length as the vector [21]

Answer 1

When you end up with this error its obvious that it's having trouble matching the data with what it's parsed for header values. The simplest way around this is to simply turn off header parsing entirely:

table.list <- readHTMLTable(theurl, header=F)