[Rd] [R] help with read.table() function

[Marc Schwartz]

I would argue against this.

If this were the default, that is requiring user interaction, it would
break a fair amount of code that I (and I am sure a lot of others have)
where automation is critical.

A lot of the issues seem to be user errors, file permission errors,
hidden extensions as is pointed out below and related issues. If there
is a legitimate bug in R resulting in these issues, then let's patch
that. However, I don't think that I can recall reproducible situations
where a bug in R is the root cause of these problems.

Best regards,

Marc Schwartz

On Sun, 2006-01-29 at 12:18 -0500, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> (Moved from R-help).
> 
> This comes up often enough that I'm starting to think most functions 
> that take filename arguments should have file.choose() as the default 
> value.  Then one could do
> 
> read.table()
> 
> and have a dialog box pop up in Windows, or some other prompt for a 
> filename in other platforms.  Are there any obviously bad side effects 
> from a change like this?
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
> On 1/29/2006 11:51 AM, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> > Romain Francois <francoisromain at free.fr> writes:
> > 
> >> Le 29.01.2006 16:26, oliver wee a écrit :
> >>
> >>> hello, I have just started using R for doing a project
> >>> in time series...
> >>>
> >>> unfortunately, I am having trouble using the
> >>> read.table function for use in reading my data set.
> >>>
> >>> This is what I'm getting:
> >>> I inputted:
> >>> data <-
> >>> read.table("D:/Oliver/Professional/Studies/Time Series
> >>> Analysis/spdc2693.data", header = TRUE)
> >>>
> >>> I got:
> >>> Error in file(file, "r") : unable to open connection
> >>> In addition: Warning message:
> >>> cannot open file 'D:/Oliver/Professional/Studies/Time
> >>> Series Analysis/spdc2693.data', reason 'No such file
> >>> or directory'
> >>>
> >>> as I am just a novice programmer, I really would
> >>> appreciate help from you guys. Is there a need to
> >>> setpath in R, like in java or something like that...
> >>>
> >>> I am using the windows version btw. 
> >>>
> >>> I have also tried to put the file in the work
> >>> directory of R, so that I only typed 
> >>> data <- read.table("spdc2693.data", header = TRUE)
> >>> Again, it won't work, with the same error message.
> >>>
> >>> I would appreciate any help. thanks again.
> >>>  
> >>>
> >> Hi, try :
> >>
> >> read.table(file.choose(), header=TRUE)
> >>
> >> and go to your file.
> >> Also, you can look a ?setwd, ?getwd
> > 
> > Right. Or just file.choose() and see what the OS thinks your file is
> > really called. The most common causes for symptoms like that are
> > 
> > (A) The file is "spcd2693.data"
> > (B) There's an extra extension which ever helpful Windows decided to
> > hide, as in "spdc2693.data.txt".
> > 
> >
> 
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