Hi all,

I am hoping that someone can help me with a problem I am having with column
headings.  I have read a table into R using read.table: the rows are
documents, and the columns are counts of regular expression matches (so that
the column heading is the given regular expression).  My problem is that
read.table seems to be trying to interpret the regular expressions, or has
trouble with the special characters, so that the column headings are not
coming out correctly.  For example, a column headed with: \bV\.?A\.?T\.?
will come out as X.bV...A...T...  This would not be a problem, since the
regular expressions are still readable, except that I have a number of other
tables that I will need to intersect with these column headings.  In some of
those tables, the regular expressions are data, and they are coming in
correctly (although R seems to be doubling "\"s, which is fine so long as it
does this consistently).

I have also tried importing the column names as a vector and specifying that
vector explicitly using col.names, but R still transforms the provided names
as above.  Is it possible to force R to read in regular expressions
completely literally, with no interpretation?  Alternately, can I force R to
interpret the column headings in the same way that it interprets data (i.e.
adding the extra slash), so that I can match on these values?


Thanks,
Matt

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