On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 7:43 AM, John Edwards <jhnedwards...@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?
Looks like the Unicode character called 'byte order mark' (BOM), cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark It looks like your 'main.txt' text file was created by a software that saves it as a Unicode-encoded text file. If you need a plain old-style ASCII text file, see if you can resave it as such. With last year's development in R, it also not unlikely that you can tell R to read in the existing file by specifying the encoding, but since I don't now how to do that I leave that as an search-the-help exercise for you. /Henrik > > Thanks, > John > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.