On Wed, 5 Jul 2006, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
John.Maindonald at anu.edu.au 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.)