[R] Weird error (special character) of read.table

[Prof Brian Ripley]

And how to read a file with a BOM is actually discussed in detail in 
the 'R Data Import/Export' manual of 2.12.2 RC.

What should be ASCII files with BOMs seem to be cropping up rather 
frequently these days: the recent culprits are Mac applications with 
origins on Windows (SPSS was one, some version of Excel another).

On Tue, 22 Feb 2011, John Edwards wrote:

> Thanks for all the people that replied my message. The text file indeed has
> "\uFEFF". I have fixed the text file by using 'gvim -b'.
>
> On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 10:03 AM, Jeff Newmiller
> <jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us>wrote:
>
>> What you describe could be a bug (in which case providing your OS and R
>> version info per the posting guidelines would be a minimum requirement to
>> get it fixed) or a control character that is actually in your file (which
>> you might need a binary editor to see).
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Jeff Newmiller The ..... ..... Go Live...
>> DCN:<jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us> Basics: ##.#. ##.#. Live Go...
>> Live: OO#.. Dead: OO#.. Playing
>> Research Engineer (Solar/Batteries O.O#. #.O#. with
>> /Software/Embedded Controllers) .OO#. .OO#. rocks...1k
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.
>>
>> John Edwards <jhnedwards603 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I have the following input file.
>>> $ cat main.txt
>>> CEL_A CELL_B
>>> 1 4
>>> 2 5
>>> 2 6
>>>
>>> Then I run read.table in R.
>>>
>>>> f=read.table('main.txt', header=T, check.names=F, sep='\t')
>>>> head(f)
>>>   \ufeffCEL_A CELL_B
>>> 1    1      4
>>> 2    2      5
>>> 3    2      6
>>>> f$CEL_A
>>> NULL
>>>
>>> I'm not sure where the special character \ufeff comes from. Could anybody let me know what is the problem?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> John
>>>
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>>>
>
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>
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>

-- 
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