Dear R users and Helpers

I am beginner with using R and interested in carrying out certain task for my statistical research.
I am reading data for a text file, which could contain data in following pattern

x	y
8	10
11	14
16	16
18	15
6	20
4	4
20	18

As per the example I have two columns and 7 rows of data in each. 
However is real life data situation I may not know how many columns are present and how rows are present  and also with the certain data is missing. Yes I am assuming the data is delimited my Tab.


My question or rather problem is I want read data from each colum say col x (8,11,16,18.....20) and store it into a variable so that I could perform some operations on them.

I have also looked into certain R-help for Read.table and data.frame but still struggling on my requirement. They are

http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/04/07/2040.html
http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/04/07/3152.html


Regards
Kunal


