[R] Unwanted Levels in R

[MATT BORKOWSKI]

I searched the mailing list archives and found one post relevant to my problem, 
but it was not specific enough to solve my problem.

I am reading in a large file of data (I believe it is in ASCII format).  I have tried
reading the file in as a data frame and as a list, and both methods result in 
unwanted levels being created which leads to problems when I try to copy
or reference certain cells.  I suspect the problem may be because there are 
character strings randomly intersparsed with numeric data.  If this is the problem,
is there anyway to overcome it?  Here are a few lines of the data I'm 
attempting to read in:

A  900003024 ODEN   SWEDEN  ODEN91 NSIDC.ORG/PROJE 
B     900003         -9  1 NAN OBS         0
C 1991  9  7 13 -9 XX   90.0000     .0000 XX
D    36   10.0   10.1 4183.0 4270.7 4219.0 Z 13  0 OBSERV
E    -9.0   -9.0 -9.0000 -9.0000 -9.0000 -9.0000 -9.0000 -9.0000 -9.0000 
   10.0   10.1 -1.6970 -1.6971 31.4940 25.3287 34.8044 43.8535 -9.0000 

Here are the commands I have tried using to read in the data:

>alldata <- read.table("/home/mattb/xxx.dat", fill = TRUE, quote = "")

>alldata <- as.list(read.table("/home/mattb/xxx.dat", fill = TRUE, quote = "")

Thanks for your time,

Matt


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