[R] multiple separators in sep argument for read.table?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sat, 19 Apr 2008, Johan Jackson wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Is there any way to add multiple separators in the sep= argument in
> read.table? I would like to be able to create different columns if I see a
> white space OR a "/".

No.  read.table() uses scan(), and that requires 'sep' to be a single 
character (if specified).

You can read your dataset by readLines, change "/" to, say, "\t" by gsub() 
and then use read.table() on a textConnection() from the resulting 
character vector.

-- 
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