read.table and missing values

<snip>

You have set sep="\t", haven't you?  The default separator is white space,
and that will swallow two tabs.  The following had tabs in originally,

a	b	c
1	2	3
4		6
8	9

and gives

 read.table("foo.dat", header=T, sep="\t")

   a  b c
1  1  2 3
2  4 NA 6
3 NA  8 9

<snip>

Cool! Thanks a lot! I had the same problem a while ago and solved it
by replacing two consecutive tabs with \t""\t. Now I see what the
problem was: When I'm not using R I'm using StatView and StatView
defaults to the tab as separator. (I don't remember what it was in
SPSS or Systat.) So I assumed that it's the same with R.
I didn't notice the sep = "" in the Usage section of the help page.
To make the default value more visible in this case it would be
nice if in the Arguments/sep section for read.table it would read
... If sep = "" (the default) the separator is ...
                 -------------

Cheers,

Ragnar

(Must've said "blimey" once too often -
  now I'm really blind every now and then ;)
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