reading "special" text files

hello,

assume you have a txt-file (sep="\t" or "") looking as follows that you
want to read into a variable:

Into a variable or a data frame?

1	1	2			3
2	1	2	3		4
3	1	5	6	7	8

the result should look like this (e.g., in a data.frame):

With no column names? Not possible.

1	1	2	3
2	1	2	3	4
3	1	5	6	7	8

is there any way to do so?

I think we need to know what the structure here is.  At a guess, the 
separator is multiple tabs as in the example.  In that case

read.table("foo", header=FALSE, fill = TRUE)

V1 V2 V3 V4 V5 V6
1  1  1  2  3 NA NA
2  2  1  2  3  4 NA
3  3  1  5  6  7  8

or

read.table("foo", header=FALSE, fill = TRUE, row.names=1)

V2 V3 V4 V5 V6
1  1  2  3 NA NA
2  1  2  3  4 NA
3  1  5  6  7  8

does in essence what you want.

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 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595