"NA" vs. NA

Dear All,

I assume this is an R-devel issue, apologies if I missed something
obvious. I have a dataframe where the row names are country codes,
based on ISO 3166, something like this:

------------
"v1"    "v2"
"UK"    1    2
"NA"    2    3
------------

It happens that "NA" is the country code for "Namibia", and that
creates problems on using this data within a package due to this:

Error in read.table(zfile, header = TRUE, as.is = FALSE) :
  missing values in 'row.names' are not allowed

I realise that NA is reserved in R, but I assumed that when quoted it
would be usable.
For the moment I simply changes the country code, but I wonder if
there's any (other) solution to circumvent this issue.

Thanks very much in advance,
Adrian

Adrian Dusa
Romanian Social Data Archive
1, Schitu Magureanu Bd.
050025 Bucharest sector 5
Romania
Tel.:+40 21 3126618 \
? ? ? ?+40 21 3120210 / int.101
Fax: +40 21 3158391