read.table problem with column headers

On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Tom Arnold wrote:

When I use read.table I can't get my column names

to

line up with my data.

The data file has survey response data, and each

line

starts with a unique key field (which should be

the

row name when it gets read in, right? I've only

been

using R for one day so bear with me)

The first row in the file has column names, and

the

first name is "Key", followed by "Age" and so on.

for

example:

Key;Age;Gender;Years In IT; #more column labels...
20020220_144752_15178;41;0;17; #more data...

When I read this in, saying
survey = read.table("myfile.dat",TRUE,";")

I wind up with "Age" column being named "Key" and

all

the column labels shift to the right. No matter

what

I've tried, I can't put *my* header on the first
column of row names. If it put no header on that
column, I get an error "more columns than column
names"

What can I do to get my data labels on correctly?

read.table("myfile.dat",TRUE,";")

                    Key Age Gender Years.In.IT
1 20020220_144752_15178  41      0          17

is what I get from your code.  I suspect you wanted

read.table("myfile.dat",TRUE,";", row.names=1)

                      Age Gender Years.In.IT
20020220_144752_15178  41      0          17

Do you perchance have the wrong number of names in
your first line,
say one too few?


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                 
ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, 
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865
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