[R] Read.table fail to recognize (+/-) sign

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Please do show us the courtesy of following the posting guide, and make 
sure you use a current version of R.  R 2.7.2 and 2.8.0 beta do not do 
this, and you were asked to update *before* posting.

[My guess is that you are using the long-obsolete 2.7.0.]

On Mon, 6 Oct 2008, Gundala Viswanath wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I have the following dataset:
>
> # HIT or acc, UCSC genome, chromosome, strand, start, end, species name
> HIT000000001    hg18    chr8    +   1759549 1894206 Human
> HIT000000005    hg18    chr11   -   8593662 8636959 Human
> HIT000000007    hg18    chr5    +   31675274    32146794    Human
> HIT000000011    hg18    chr5    +   79739648    79810715    Human
>
> (also downloadable at http://dpaste.com/82688/plain/  )
>
> However with the following command:
>
>> source <- read.table("clipboard")
>> source
>                V1   V2    V3 V4        V5        V6    V7
> 1     HIT000000001 hg18  chr8  0   1759549   1894206 Human
> 2     HIT000000005 hg18 chr11  0   8593662   8636959 Human
> 3     HIT000000007 hg18  chr5  0  31675274  32146794 Human
> 4     HIT000000011 hg18  chr5  0  79739648  79810715 Human
>
> Note that the V4 column read.table fail to capture the PLUS/MINUS sign,
> it gives 0 instead.
>
> Is there a way I can enable read.table to recognize those signs?
>
>
> - Gundala Viswanath
> Jakarta - Indonesia
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

Thar *does* apply to you!


-- 
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