[R] Scanning tab-separated numbers

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 1 Mar 2004, Robert W. Baer, Ph.D. wrote:

> 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().

It does seem to be intentional: all ctrl characters (those <= 0x1f) are
reserved for controlling the console.  There is no implementation of tabs
in RGui, so TAB = ^I is currently ignored (along with ^G ^Q ^R ^S).

Note that pasting tabs into the Unix R console does not work either (tab
is used for completion in readline), and generally you should not expect
to be able to paste any control characters into a console (even inside
quotes).

-- 
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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595