[R] read.table() and scientific notation

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, January Weiner wrote:

> Oh, thanks, that was hint enough :-) I see it now. I turns that R does
> not understand
>
> e-10
>
> ...which stands for 1e-10 and is produced by some of the bioinformatic
> applications that I use (notably BLAST).

And that is not standard C notation.

> However, R instead of being
> verbose on that just assumes that the whole column is a string.
>
> Is there a way to enforce a specific conversion in R (for example, to
> be able to see where the errors are?).

Please study ?read.table, especially 'colClasses'.

-- 
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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