Input and Output in R 139
These functions will take either the name of a file or a connection and at-
tempt to read data from that. There are three primary ways in which they
differ: what is considered to be a separator of the data items, the character
used to delimit quoted strings, and what character is used for the decimal
indicator. The most general of these is read.table and, in fact, the others
are merely wrappers to read.table with appropriate values set for the argu-
ments. However, comma-separated values (.csv) occur often enough that it
is worthwhile to have the convenience function.
Among the more important arguments to read.table are:
as.is by default, character variables are turned into factors; setting as.is to
TRUE, they are left as character ...