[R] Newbie: Data reading problem

[TRAN Liem FTM/Men]

Hello everybody,

I'm a new R user and I've got some difficulties to find the right way to
read data files.

My problem is the following:

I have dayly records of different devices (they all have their own name)
during a time period (let's say one year). Each device records 6 fields. 

I would like to consider that one "fellow" is the recording of one to
six fields for one
device during the time period. 
So my data files have the following format (F = field):

date      device F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6
01/01/99  name1  x  y  z  a  a  b
  |       name1  s  d  g  g  n  r
  |       name1  e  z  a  t  p  m
31/12/99  name1  f  g  h  t  e  b
01/01/99  name2  zz ww xx gg gg h
  |       name2  aa qq dy ff gr k
  |       name2  mr ty t  te  m a
31/12/99  name2  az er rr e  l  m

and so on for 40 device.

I would like to keep the link beetween each type of record and the name
device.

If I use read.table, the two first columns are loaded but I can't make
basic operation on matrices because the following error appears:
>Warning messages: 
>1: NAs introduced by coercion  
>2: NAs introduced by coercion 

My basic questions are then: How can I keep the link beetwen name device
(character) (with date ifpossible) and the recorded fields (numeric)?
What is the command to use for reading this file format and use basic
functions on matrices (i.e, calculus will not take care about nor names,
neither dates)

I hope my explanation is clear.

Sorry for disturbing and many thanks in advance for any help

Liêm TRAN
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