[R] Read.table for macs

cstrato cstrato at aon.at
Fri Jan 24 18:53:06 CET 2003


I agree with you. For the same purpose I use Text-Edit Plus,
which is also free and in my opinion is the best all-purpose
text editor on any platform (but sorrowly not for programming).

Best regards
Christian Stratowa


Paul Pynsent wrote:

> I detect an anti Mac theme, I do not wish to attribute blame but suggest 
> that Excel does funny things when it dumps tab separated text files, 
> like adding unprintable characters and trailing spaces.
> My approach is to use BBedit (which is free) to:
> 1) zap gremlins
> 2) globally substitute \ \t for \t (ie remove trailing spaces which R 
> does not ignore).
> 3) convert DOS new lines to Mac new lines.
> Equally you could use awk etc. on a Mac to do this.  In general it is 
> not safe to do this cleaning operation on a DOS/Windows system as 
> conversions may still take place on transmission to an Apple.
> 
> On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 05:10  am, Hamish McCallum wrote:
> 
>> Dear All,
>>
>> I've been using R for windows for a while, without too many problems. 
>> However, I'm forced to use the MAC OS system for teaching, because our 
>> teaching labs are mac only (not my idea!!). I have a very basic 
>> problem, but one that doesn't appear on the FAQs. I simply want to 
>> import data from a spreadsheet. I'm using exactly what works fine on 
>> Windows, namely:
>>
>> 1    save the file from Excel as tab-delimited, say called "test.txt", 
>> with the variable names in the first row.
>> 2    Read in into R with
>> test<-read.table("test.txt", header=T)
>>
>> It does weird things, especially if any variables are characters. For 
>> example, it has omitted the 5th observation for the 1st variable, and 
>> then appended it to the first variable name. I've tried read.csv with 
>> csv files, read.delim, etc. None seem to work. Am I being really 
>> silly, and if so, how do you do it? Or is there an easier way to get 
>> data into the mac port? Or is the mac port entirely useless?
>>
>> Can anyone out there help?
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Hamish McCallum
>>
>> -- 
>> Dr Hamish McCallum
>> Department of Zoology and Entomology
>> The University of Queensland
>> Brisbane 4072
>> Australia
>> Phone (+617) 3365 2450 Fax (+617) 3365 1655
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>> http://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>
>>
> Dr. P. B. Pynsent,
> Research and Teaching Centre,
> Royal Orthopaedic Hospital,
> Birmingham, B31 2AP, U.K.
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> http://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> 
>




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