[Rd] read.table() errors with tab as separator (PR#9061)

[Peter Dalgaard]

Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:

> > Sorry, unclear. We already change quote= for read.delim and read.csv,
> > and I was suggesting also to modify the default for comment.char for
> > those functions, but definitely not for read.table.
> >
> > Arguably, those functions are there to handle file formats generated
> > by other programs, and it is unlikely that such programs will generate
> > comment lines starting with #, whereas we have learned that Excel will
> > occasionally generate fields like #NULL#, which mess up the parsing.
> 
> Ah, that does seem a sensible defensive move.

Committed for r-devel (only). Make check seems happy, but we may need
to watch out for the package checking.

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