Since many people commenting on the gene name problem in Excel essentially tell us This could never have happened with R I want to show you a somewhat related issue:
ff1 <- tempfile() cat(file = ff1, "12345", "1E002", sep = "\n") xdf1 <- read.fwf(ff1, widths = 5, stringsAsFactors=FALSE) ff2 <- tempfile() cat(file = ff2, "12345", "1E002","1A010", sep = "\n") xdf2 <- read.fwf(ff2, widths = 5, stringsAsFactors=FALSE) in xdf1, the variable is numeric, in xdf2, it is a character variable. Of course, in hindsight this makes sense. But the problem is similar to the Excel problem where something which could be a date is interpreted as a date. A possible solution with my read.fwf problem would be to have a parameter forcing variables to be read as strings.
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