[Rd] Bug in read.table() (PR#1477)

[richard_raubertas@merck.com]

The following command,

temp <- read.table("c:/rfr/r/test.txt")

reads the text file "test.txt", which contains the following lines:

21437
21438
21419-2
21420-2
21421-2
21422-2

and produces the following result:

> temp
        V1
1 21437+0i
2 21438+0i
3     0+0i
4     0+0i
5     0+0i
6     0+0i
> 

These "numbers" are actually sample ID's, and I expected the presence of the
hyphen would
cause temp to be character or a factor, but it ends up as complex numbers.
System info:

platform i386-pc-mingw32
arch     x86            
os       Win32          
system   x86, Win32     
status                  
major    1              
minor    4.1            
year     2002           
month    01             
day      30             
language R              
>

Following is a diagnosis of the problem by one of my colleagues:

> From: 	Huntsinger, Reid  
> Sent:	Monday, April 22, 2002 5:15 PM
> To:	Raubertas, Richard
> Subject:	RE: R problem
> 
> [ ... ] This happens 
> because of the attempt to convert. The function type.convert 
> is called on columns with unspecified types; this tries to 
> convert to "logical, integer, numeric or complex" in that 
> order (first one that is successful wins). You have some ids 
> like 21428-2 which type.convert doesn't like as numeric but 
> will treat as complex. This in turn is due to R's hand-rolled 
> "strtoc" function, which returns 0+0i for something it 
> doesn't like. This is a valid value, so the conversion 
> "works", and all values are converted this way... 
> 
> You or I should probably alert the R people. That's not very 
> good behavior.


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