[R] Read.table for macs

[Paul Pynsent]

I detect an anti Mac theme, I do not wish to attribute blame but 
suggest that Excel does funny things when it dumps tab separated text 
files, like adding unprintable characters and trailing spaces.
My approach is to use BBedit (which is free) to:
1) zap gremlins
2) globally substitute \ \t for \t (ie remove trailing spaces which R 
does not ignore).
3) convert DOS new lines to Mac new lines.
Equally you could use awk etc. on a Mac to do this.  In general it is 
not safe to do this cleaning operation on a DOS/Windows system as 
conversions may still take place on transmission to an Apple.

On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 05:10  am, Hamish McCallum wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> I've been using R for windows for a while, without too many problems. 
> However, I'm forced to use the MAC OS system for teaching, because our 
> teaching labs are mac only (not my idea!!). I have a very basic 
> problem, but one that doesn't appear on the FAQs. I simply want to 
> import data from a spreadsheet. I'm using exactly what works fine on 
> Windows, namely:
>
> 1    save the file from Excel as tab-delimited, say called "test.txt", 
> with the variable names in the first row.
> 2    Read in into R with
> test<-read.table("test.txt", header=T)
>
> It does weird things, especially if any variables are characters. For 
> example, it has omitted the 5th observation for the 1st variable, and 
> then appended it to the first variable name. I've tried read.csv with 
> csv files, read.delim, etc. None seem to work. Am I being really 
> silly, and if so, how do you do it? Or is there an easier way to get 
> data into the mac port? Or is the mac port entirely useless?
>
> Can anyone out there help?
>
> Thanks
>
> Hamish McCallum
>
> -- 
> Dr Hamish McCallum
> Department of Zoology and Entomology
> The University of Queensland
> Brisbane 4072
> Australia
> Phone (+617) 3365 2450 Fax (+617) 3365 1655
>
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>
>
Dr. P. B. Pynsent,
Research and Teaching Centre,
Royal Orthopaedic Hospital,
Birmingham, B31 2AP, U.K.