Problems with scan() in a tab-sep .txt file with cells that have '///' (three frontslashes)

Hello all,

I'm using the following scan() parameters on a tab-separated text file that was generated by R.

temp_file <- scan(file = outfile, sep="\t", what = character(), skip = 1, nlines = 1)

The problem is that within some cells, there are cases where there are 
three frontslashes ( /// ). However, the file itself is tab-separated, 
and the exact problem is that even if I specify sep="\t" in the argument 
to scan(), whenever it encounters a /// it overrides the tab separation, 
and uses the /// as the separator. Then within that column, I see a 
bunch of /t in the output, and no ///. There are also some cells with 
two frontslashes ( // ), but scan handles them just fine.

### 10 lines of "//\t///"
cat(file="tmp.dat", rep(paste(c("//","///"),collapse='\t'),10),sep='\n')
scan('tmp.dat',sep='\t',what='a')

version

I've tried many, many other combinations of parameters, but have not found the right one.

I know this shouldn't be a problem, b/c read.csv() and read.table() call scan(), and when calling them, such as:

abc <- read.table(outfile, sep="\t", header=T)

...I don't have the problem. The /// show up in the output verbatim, and the /t are used as proper delimiters.

If anyone can tell me which parameter I am missing in scan(), I would be very grateful. I'd prefer not to have to use make.names() to handle the slashes.

Thanks in advance for any help,
-Ken