[R] Saving data in an R package - how to maintain that t avariable is a 'factor' when it is coded as 1, 2, 3...

[Prof Brian Ripley]

?read.table, see argument colClasses.

You can use a .R wrapper to a .tab file in the data directory of a 
package.  Or, perhaps better, include it as a .rda file.

On Fri, 13 Jan 2006, Søren Højsgaard wrote:

> I have a .txt file obtained by saving a data frame in which the first four columns are factors (but represented as 1,2,3 etc). The first four lines are
>
> "Pig" "Evit" "Cu" "Litter" "Start" "Weight" "Feed" "Time"
> "4601" "1" "1" "1" 26.5 26.5 NA 1
> "4601" "1" "1" "1" 26.5 27.59999 5.200005 2
> "4601" "1" "1" "1" 26.5 36.5 17.6 3
> "4601" "1" "1" "1" 26.5 40.29999 28.5 4
>
> I would like to include that data set in an R-package. When I load the data from the package the first four columns are read in as numeric variables. This is consistent with the documentation of read.table - but it is not what I want! I can of course change the coding of the variables, but there ought to be another way. Can anyone help me on that?
> Best regards
> Søren Højsgaard
>
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-- 
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)
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