[R] Pasting data into scan()

[Murray Jorgensen]

I think that Mozilla Thunderbird replaces tabs with blanks routinely.
I was actually pasting from Crimson Editor but results are identical 
with Notepad and MS Word. However there is no problem when pasting from 
WinEdt:

 > strength <- scan()
1: 0.023   0.032   0.054   0.069   0.081   0.094
7: 0.105   0.127   0.148   0.169   0.188   0.216
13: 0.255   0.277   0.311   0.361   0.376   0.395
19: 0.432   0.463   0.481   0.519   0.529   0.567
25: 0.642   0.674   0.752   0.823   0.887   0.926
31:
Read 30 items

and scanning the file directly works with or without ' sep="\t" ':
 > strength <- scan("C:\\Files\\Teaching\\STAT321\\tensile.dat")
Read 30 items
 > strength <- scan("C:\\Files\\Teaching\\STAT321\\tensile.dat",sep="\t")
Read 30 items

I will send the file to BR (but not to the list!)

Murray Jorgensen

Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> No tabs are being echoed, so your cut/paste is removing the tabs.
> What are you pasting from? (Not an R problem, of course.)
> 
> On Tue, 2 May 2006, Murray Jorgensen wrote:
> 
>> The file TENSILE.DAT from the Hand et al "Handbook of Small Data Sets"
>> looks like this:
>>
>> 0.023    0.032    0.054    0.069    0.081    0.094
>> 0.105    0.127    0.148    0.169    0.188    0.216
>> 0.255    0.277    0.311    0.361    0.376    0.395
>> 0.432    0.463    0.481    0.519    0.529    0.567
>> 0.642    0.674    0.752    0.823    0.887    0.926
>>
>> except that my mail client has replaced the tab separators by blanks. If
>> I paste this data into R 2.2.1 what I get is
>>
>> > strength <- scan()
>> 1: 0.0230.0320.0540.0690.0810.094
>> 1: 0.1050.1270.1480.1690.1880.216
>> Error in scan() : scan() expected 'a real', got
>> '0.0230.0320.0540.0690.0810.094'
>> > 0.2550.2770.3110.3610.3760.395
>> Error: syntax error in "0.2550.2770"
>> > 0.4320.4630.4810.5190.5290.567
>> Error: syntax error in "0.4320.4630"
>> > 0.6420.6740.7520.8230.8870.926
>> Error: syntax error in "0.6420.6740"
>>
>> Aha! I thought, what I need is     scan(sep = "\t")
>> but this generates the same error messages.
>>
>> Help!   Murray
>>
>>
> 

-- 
Dr Murray Jorgensen      http://www.stats.waikato.ac.nz/Staff/maj.html
Department of Statistics, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
Email: maj at waikato.ac.nz                                Fax 7 838 4155
Phone  +64 7 838 4773 wk    Home +64 7 825 0441    Mobile 021 1395 862