[Rd] read.table with ":" in column names (PR#8511)

[peverlorenvanthemaat@amc.uva.nl]

Full_Name: emiel ver loren
Version: 2.2.0
OS: Windows XP
Submission from: (NULL) (145.117.31.248)


Dear R-community and developers,

I have been trying to read in a tab delimeted file where the column names and
the row names are of the form "GO:0000051" (gene ontology IDs). When using:

> gomat<-read.table("test.txt")
> colnames(gomat)[1]
[1] "GO.0000051"
> rownames(gomat)[1]
[1] "GO:0000002"

Which means that ":" is transformed into a "." !! This seems like Excel when it
is trying to guess what I am really ment (and turning 1/1/1 into 1-1-2001).

Furthermore, I found the following quite strange as well:

> gomat2<-read.delim2("test.txt",header=FALSE)
> gomat2[1,1:2]
          V1         V2
1 GO:0000051 GO:0000280
>  as.character(gomat2[1,1:2])
[1] "8" "2"
> as.character(gomat2[1,1])
[1] "GO:0000051"

I have found a way to work around it, but I am wandering what's happening....

The tab-delimited file look like:

GO:0000051	GO:0000280	GO:0000740	
GO:0000002	0	0	0
GO:0000004	0	0	0
GO:0000012	0	0	0
GO:0000014	0	0	0
GO:0000015	0	0	0
GO:0000018	0	0	0
GO:0000019	0	0	0

Thanks for helping, and 

Emiel