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Newbie query - reading data into R

2 messages · Brian Ripley, Peter Dalgaard

Brian Ripley
# 
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:
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).  

I don't know how you got a list -- that may depend on the version of
R you used, so please tell us when you post. (On 0.63.2 I tried
a few ideas, but failed.  It may be that you do in fact have
a data frame, but a malformed one so that it prints like a list.)
Beware, R is `not unlike S' but it is also different from S-PLUS,
in ways that change by the R version.
Peter Dalgaard
# 
Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:
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
City Number
1       Napier    324
2     Auckland    657
3   Wellington    879
4 Christchurch    904
[1] "data.frame"

I.e. no problem. ???