[R] Newbie problem with read.table

[Marc Schwartz]

On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 14:31 +0200, Jan Conrad wrote:
> Hi R,
>  I have a seemingly simple problem. I have a table in following format
> (tab seperated)
> 
>    Njets NBjets	NElec	  NMuon   Meff	HT	  HT3j	HE	  Aplan
> Plan	       
> 1  4     3	 	2       0       366.278 253.642 87.7473   1385
> 0.0124566   0.376712       
> 2  3     1      	1       0       235.19  157.688 18.2852
> 574.253 0.00064187  0.00528814 
> 
> I read in with:
> 
> > ttbar<-read.table("test2.dat",header=TRUE)
> 
> 
> > ttbar
>   Njets NBjets NElec NMuon    Meff      HT    HT3j       HE      Aplan
> 1     4      3     2     0 366.278 253.642 87.7473 1385.000 0.01245660
> 2     3      1     1     0 235.190 157.688 18.2852  574.253 0.00064187
>         Plan
> 1 0.37671200
> 2 0.00528814,
> 
>  i.e.. the table is split after 9 variables. How come ?
> 
> Thanks,
> Jan

As per ?read.table, the default delimiter is 'sep = ""', which is any
"whitespace".

Hence, if your file is tab delimited, you need to modify your call to:

  ttbar <- read.table("test2.dat", header = TRUE, sep = "\t")

HTH,

Marc Schwartz