Newbie query - reading data into R

From: Peter Dalgaard BSA <p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk>
Date: 26 Jan 1999 15:43:08 +0100

Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:

Try sep="\t", if they are really separated by tabs (they were not in
your email by the time it reached here).  Actually, you don't need
as.if=F, either, as the first column should be the row names:

read.table("test.dat", header=T, row.names=1, sep="\t")

             Number
Napier          324
Auckland        657
Wellington      879
Christchurch    904

works on your example (with tabs in the file).

(S-PLUS behaves differently here, and guesses the first column
should be the row names without being told).  

So does read.table on Unix - I don't remember it doing anything else?

And with the original data (TAB separated and with a header for col.1
too), I got

read.table("~/tmp/testdata", header=T)

          City Number
1       Napier    324
2     Auckland    657
3   Wellington    879
4 Christchurch    904

class(read.table("~/tmp/testdata", header=T))

[1] "data.frame"

I.e. no problem. ???

read.table("test.dat", header=T)

read.table("test.dat", header=T)