[R] Pasting data into scan()

[Prof Brian Ripley]

No tabs are being echoed, so your cut/paste is removing the tabs.
What are you pasting from? (Not an R problem, of course.)

On Tue, 2 May 2006, Murray Jorgensen wrote:

> The file TENSILE.DAT from the Hand et al "Handbook of Small Data Sets"
> looks like this:
>
> 0.023	0.032	0.054	0.069	0.081	0.094
> 0.105	0.127	0.148	0.169	0.188	0.216
> 0.255	0.277	0.311	0.361	0.376	0.395
> 0.432	0.463	0.481	0.519	0.529	0.567
> 0.642	0.674	0.752	0.823	0.887	0.926
>
> except that my mail client has replaced the tab separators by blanks. If
> I paste this data into R 2.2.1 what I get is
>
> > strength <- 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'
> > 0.2550.2770.3110.3610.3760.395
> Error: syntax error in "0.2550.2770"
> > 0.4320.4630.4810.5190.5290.567
> Error: syntax error in "0.4320.4630"
> > 0.6420.6740.7520.8230.8870.926
> Error: syntax error in "0.6420.6740"
>
> Aha! I thought, what I need is     scan(sep = "\t")
> but this generates the same error messages.
>
> Help!   Murray
>
>

-- 
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