[R] read.table, input methods

[John D. Barnett]

Hi-

I'm trying to read data into R that was exported from Excel, as
tab-delimited text.  There are some empty cells in the spreadsheet,
which I'd like to treat as missing values.

I'd like to specify to read.table to use a *single* tab character as the
record separator, but I can't seem to do this.  First of all, how can I
get a tab character in R?  Second, is it possible to force read.table
not to skip multiple separators?

I could preprocess the text, say in perl, to insert missing value
strings where needed; is this my only recourse?

Thanks for your help-- both now and for all my previous questions!  I'm
most appreciative.

-John

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