[R] Reading characters using read.table()

[ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk]

On Wed, 7 Aug 2002, Florent BATY wrote:

> I need to read a vector containing names of different variables from a
> text file (a unique column). Among them one is called "T". When I use
> the function read.table with default arguments and when I call the
> element of the data frame corresponding to name of this variable it
> returns me the logical value "TRUE" whereas I was expected it to return
> the character "T".
> Is it possible to specify the type data expected in a data frame when
> using the read.table function in order to make it unable to interpret
> "T" as "True" ?? Or is there any other functions enabling to import text
> data from a text file ??

Yes, see the help page and argument colClasses.

Yes, I would have used scan().


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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