[R] use read.table for a partial reading

[Robert Baer]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Covelli Paolo" <pcovelli at tele2.it>
To: <r-help at r-project.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 08, 2010 9:05 AM
Subject: [R] use read.table for a partial reading


> Hi everyone,
>
> I've got a matrix data with 20 variables (V1, V2, V3, ...) and 215  rows 
> (observations). I'm interested to read only the first and second 
> variables using "read.table" function. How can I do?


You do not provide a reproducible example (see 
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html), so my comments are somewhat of 
a guess.

Typically, when you read in data from a file in R, you read it into a 'data 
frame' not a matrix.
(To earn more 
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.html#Lists-and-data-frames)

This is how you would get your data (the dataframe) in the form you desire:
dat <- read.table("mydata.txt", header = TRUE)
dat2 <- dat[,1:2]  # contains just the first two variables, V1 and V2



>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Paolo.
>
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