[R] Prevent read.table from converting "+" and "-" to 0

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 4 Nov 2008, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> On 11/4/2008 9:08 AM, Daren Tan wrote:
>> I am using read.table("data.txt", sep="\t") to read in a tab-limited text 
>> file. However, two columns of data were read wrongly. read.table converts 
>> "+" and "-" in the two columns to 0. I have tried setting other parameters 
>> but to no avail. 
>
> Set the column classes (using the colClasses argument).  It is guessing 
> numeric, but clearly that's not true.

I don't think any recent version of R (e.g. 2.7.1 and later) does that, 
although some earlier versions did on some platforms.

So an even better solution is to update the R involved (as the posting 
guide asked...).

-- 
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