[R] Summary re: read.table on Mac OS 10

Jason Boyd BOYDJ at mail.rx.uga.edu
Wed Feb 20 00:22:45 CET 2002


Thanks to all who responded.  Not all of the advice 
helped me with that particular problem, but, I have 
learned a lot just from your answers.  

1.  R for Mac 10 (Carbon version) uses the Mac 
convention of using ":" for the usual Unix "/" and thanks 
to Dr. Lumley for that since I'm new to R, Mac10, Macs 
in general, and Unix.
2.  Interestingly, Dr. Ripley suggested to me not to use 
spaces in the path as R wouldn't be able to read them.  
I've found that on my Mac, spaces often come as 
default in file names.  As long as I use the ":" (see 1) I 
can also use a space.  I'm not sure of the Darwin/
Xwinows version of R.  Looks like another Mac 
convention though.
3.  The problem is partially solved:  I never was able to 
read the data set I made with Mac's TextEdit.  But, on 
entering the data at R's runtime window, I was able to 
write.table to an external file, shut down R and/or the 
computer, and come back later to read.table ... no 
problem.  Perhaps TextEdit throws some extra code in, 
not sure <although I did save the data as simple text 
and fixed width format, really the only two options I 
could manipulate in TextEdit>  I'll try Mac SimpleText (a 
Developer Tool) and emacs to see what happens with 
them.
4.  Having fun with R!

Thanks again for the help, if things with the text editors 
and read.table change I'll post my findings.

Cheers,
Jason Boyd
graduate student
University of Georgia
College of Pharmacy

600 MHz 128 Mb iBook Mac OS 10.1, Fink & DevTools
Carbonized R1.4.0

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