file
the name of the file which the data are to be read from.
Each row of the table appears as one line of the file. If it does
not contain an absolute path, the file name is
relative to the current working directory,
getwd()
. Tilde-expansion is performed where supported.
This can be a compressed file (see file
).
Alternatively, file
can be a readable text-mode
connection (which will be opened for reading if
necessary, and if so close
d (and hence destroyed) at
the end of the function call). (If stdin()
is used,
the prompts for lines may be somewhat confusing. Terminate input
with a blank line or an EOF signal, Ctrl-D
on Unix and
Ctrl-Z
on Windows. Any pushback on stdin()
will be
cleared before return.)
file
can also be a complete URL. (For the supported URL
schemes, see the ‘URLs’ section of the help for
url
.)
header
a logical value indicating whether the file contains the
names of the variables as its first line. If missing, the value is
determined from the file format: header
is set to TRUE
if and only if the first row contains one fewer field than the
number of columns.
sep
the field separator character. Values on each line of the
file are separated by this character. If sep = ""
(the
default for read.table
) the separator is ‘white space’,
that is one or more spaces, tabs, newlines or carriage returns.
quote
the set of quoting characters. To disable quoting
altogether, use quote = ""
. See scan
for the
behaviour on quotes embedded in quotes. Quoting is only considered
for columns read as character, which is all of them unless
colClasses
is specified.
dec
the character used in the file for decimal points.
fill
logical. If TRUE
then in case the rows have unequal
length, blank fields are implicitly added. See ‘Details’.
comment.char
character: a character vector of length one
containing a single character or an empty string. Use ""
to
turn off the interpretation of comments altogether.