[R] Multiple comment.char under read.table

[Daniel Folkinshteyn]

according to the helpfile, comment only takes one character, so you'll 
have to do some 'magic' :)

i'd suggest to first run mydata through sed, and replace one of the 
comment chars with another, then run read.table with the one comment 
char that remains.

sed -e 's/^\^/!/' mydata.txt > mydata2.txt

alternatively, you could do read.table twice, once with ! and once with 
^, and then pull out all the common rows from the two results.

on 06/06/2008 03:47 AM Gundala Viswanath said the following:
> Hi all,
> 
> Suppose I want to read a text file with read.table.
> It containt lines to be skipped that begins with "!" and "^".
> 
> Is there a way to include this two values in the read.table function?
> I tried this but doesn't seem to work.
> 
> dat <- read.table("mydata.txt", comment.char = c("!","^") , na.strings
> = "null", sep = "\t");
> 
> Please advice.
>