pgfplots: How to ignore the last line of a data file?

Question

I need to plot data files which contain a comment in the last line, like this:

0  2  4
1  5  7
2  9  5  
3 11  15
4 10  15
THIS WAS: TOTAL

Now, pgfplots seems to have a problem with that giving me an error message complaining about an unbalanced number of columns.

My question is: How do I tell pgfplots to ignore the last row of the data file? (I know about the skip first option of pgfplotstable. Maybe there is an equivalent for the last row that I just couldn't find in the manual.)

MWE:

\documentclass{standalone}

\usepackage{pgfplots}
\usepackage{pgfplotstable} % For \pgfplotstableread

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{total.dos}
0  2  4
1  5  7
2  9  5  
3 11  15
4 10  15
THIS WAS: TOTAL
\end{filecontents}

\pgfplotstableread{total.dos}\total

\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}
\addplot [no markers, red] table [x=0, y=1] {\total}; \addlegendentry{$1$}
\addplot [no markers, blue] table [x=0, y=2] {\total}; \addlegendentry{$2$}

\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Answer 1

The simplest way of doing this is by adding additional line comment characters. For example:

\pgfplotstableread[comment chars={T}]{total.dos}\total

Will compile properly, i.e. "T" is now considered to start a comment line.