[R] Scanning tab-separated numbers

[Robert W. Baer, Ph.D.]

The problem would seem to be that the Windows GUI does not accept the TAB
key as input.  There is no whitespace between your values to be recongnized.
Take your sequesnce and save it as a tab separated file in Excel or through
Notepad, and you will be able to scan it in just fine using
scan("savedfile.txt")

I am not sure whether this behavior of the TAB key in the interface is
intentional or not, but it is the same on my Windows 2000 machine, yet the
TAB separated file reads in fine with scan().

Rob


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Murray Jorgensen" <maj at stats.waikato.ac.nz>
To: "R-help" <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>
Sent: Monday, March 01, 2004 3:23 PM
Subject: [R] Scanning tab-separated numbers


> I want to paste in the following numbers into a scan:
>
> 0.023 0.032 0.054 0.069 0.081 0.094
> 0.105 0.127 0.148 0.169 0.188 0.216
>
> they are separated by tabs alone, unless my mailer has done something to
> the tabs.
>
> Now have a look at this:
>
>  > scan()
> 1: 0.0230.0320.0540.0690.0810.094
> 1: 0.1050.1270.1480.1690.1880.216
> Error in scan() : "scan" expected a real, got
> "0.0230.0320.0540.0690.0810.094"
>  > scan(sep="\t")
> 1: 0.0230.0320.0540.0690.0810.094
> 1: 0.1050.1270.1480.1690.1880.216
> Error in scan(sep = "   ") : "scan" expected a real, got
> "0.0230.0320.0540.0690.0810.094"
>  >
>
> Platform: Windows XP   Release 1.8.1
>
> I can't seem to scan in tab-separated numbers even when I try to tell R
> to expect that. (this may be related to the Sweave problem I mentioned a
> few days ago.)
>
> Murray
>
> -- 
> Dr Murray Jorgensen      http://www.stats.waikato.ac.nz/Staff/maj.html
> Department of Statistics, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
> Email: maj at waikato.ac.nz                                Fax 7 838 4155
> Phone  +64 7 838 4773 wk    +64 7 849 6486 home    Mobile 021 1395 862
>
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