On Wed, 5 Jul 2006, Peter Dalgaard wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > >> (1) read.table(), with sep="\t", identifies 13 our of 1400 records, >> in a file with 1400 records of 3 fields each, as having only 2 fields. >> This happens under version 2.3.1 for Windows as well as with >> R 2.3.1 for Mac OS X, and with R-devel under Mac OS X. >> [R version 2.4.0 Under development (unstable) (2006-07-03 r38478)] >> >> (2) Using read.table() with sep="\t", the first 1569 records only >> of a 1821 record file are input. The file has exactly two fields >> in each record, and the minimum length of the second field is >> 1 character. If however I extract lines 1561 to 1650 from the >> file (the file "short.txt" below), all 90 lines are input. > > Notice that the single quote is a quote character in read.table (as > opposed to read.delim, which uses only the double quote, to cater for > TAB-separated files from Excel & friends). > >> [1] "865\tlinear model (lm)! Cook's distance\t152" > ^ > !!!! > > (This reminds me that we probably should shift the default for > comment.char too since it leads to similar issues, but it seems not to > be the problem in this case.)
This seems to imply that we should change the default for 'quote': to do so could break a lot of scripts. (Given how long the default has been comment.char="#", I doubt if we should change that either.) -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
