[R] Reading Numeric Data -- Trivial Question

[Alex K]

On 5/20/05, Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.uni-dortmund.de> wrote:
> Alex K wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> >
> >    I am very new to R, and this is certainly and uber-newby question:
> >
> >    I am trying to read a vector of numeric data that contains the log
> > of daily DJI returns and simply plot a histogram of it.
> >
> >    The data I have is in a text file format, on each line a number
> > represents the log of the returns of one day.
> >
> >    I have problems in reading this in a vector numeric format.
> >
> > If I try
> >
> > retr<- as.numeric(read.table("logDJI.TXT", header=FALSE, sep="", dec="." ));
> 
> 
> read.table() returns a data.frame, as the docs point out, but as.numeric
> expects a vector.
> 
> Either extract the first (and only?) column or read the data using
> scan(), if there is really only one column.
> 
> Uwe Ligges

  Hi Uwe, thank you for the reply.

  How do I extract only the colum?

The text file looks like:
"-0.000948343416257784
0.00181733586025109
0
0.0108130251220595"

except is has about 2200 entries (numbers) instead of just four as above.

Thank you again,
Alex



> 
> 
> > I get:
> > " Error in as.double.default(read.table("logDJIm.TXT", header = FALSE,
> > sep = "",  :
> >         (list) object cannot be coerced to 'double'"
> >
> > and when I try to plot:
> >
> >  plot(density(retr, width=.004), type="l", xlab="y", ylab="pdf");
> >
> > I get:
> >
> > "Error in density(retr, width = 0.004) : argument 'x' must be numeric"
> >
> >   If I try:
> >
> > retr<- as.data.frame(read.table("logDJI.TXT", header=FALSE, sep="", dec="." ));
> >
> > I get no reading or conversion error, but I get the same error when I
> > try to plot as above.
> >
> > Can anyone help with this?
> >
> > Thank you in advance,
> > Alex
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> 
>