[R-SIG-Finance] Error: Unexpected symbol in "1M"

[Joshua Ulrich]

This has nothing to do with finance, so you should have posted it to
R-help instead.

The answer to your question is found in "An Introduction to R",
section 1.8: R commands, case sensitivity, etc.  "... a name must
start with '.' or a letter, and if it starts with '.' the second
character must not be a digit."  Technically, you can assign a value
to a name that starts with a number, but you will run into lots of
problems.

Best,
--
Joshua Ulrich  |  about.me/joshuaulrich
FOSS Trading  |  www.fosstrading.com

R/Finance 2013: Applied Finance with R  | www.RinFinance.com


On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 5:48 PM, Wei-han Liu <weihanliu2002 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi R users:
>
> I tried the following coding:
> COMPdata <- read.csv("D:/........./Book1.csv", header=TRUE, sep=",")
> INDEX <- COMPdata[, 1]
> 1M <- COMPdata[, 2]
> 2M <- COMPdata[, 3]
>
> The partial list of original data Book1.csv is listed below:
> INDEX 1M 2M 3M 4M
> 1  0.0001026472  0.0001026472  0.0001427507  0.0001026147
> 2  0.0001026109  0.0001026109  0.0001453323  0.0001029040
> 3  0.0001169544  0.0001169544  0.0001326488  0.0001070135
> 4  0.0001159930  0.0001159930  0.0001362505  0.0001048737
> 5  0.0001212301  0.0001212301  0.0001320264  0.0001139550
> 6  0.0001211852  0.0001211852  0.0001247280  0.0001137742
>
> The dataset read-in looks fine:
>> head(COMPdata)
>   INDEX          X1M          X2M          X3M          X4M
> 1     1 0.0001026472 0.0001026472 0.0001427507 0.0001026147
> 2     2 0.0001026109 0.0001026109 0.0001453323 0.0001029040
> 3     3 0.0001169544 0.0001169544 0.0001326488 0.0001070135
> 4     4 0.0001159930 0.0001159930 0.0001362505 0.0001048737
> 5     5 0.0001212301 0.0001212301 0.0001320264 0.0001139550
> 6     6 0.0001211852 0.0001211852 0.0001247280 0.0001137742
>
> Nothing wrong with the first column:
>> INDEX <- COMPdata[, 1]
>
> However, it gives me the error message below
>> 1M <- COMPdata[, 2]
> Error: Unexpected symbol in "1M"
>
> So do the other variables 2M, 3M, and 4M.
>
>
> Could some people share advice to solve this problem?
>
> Thanks for your kind attention.
>
> Weihan
>
>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
>
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