The R Book

A Dataframe with Row Names instead of Row Numbers

You can suppress the creation of row numbers and allocate your own unique names to each row by altering the syntax of the read.table function. The first column of the worms database contains the names of the fields in which the other variables were measured. Up to now, we have read this column as if it was the first variable (p. 107).

detach(worms)
worms<-read.table("c:\\temp\\worms.txt",header=T,row.names=1)
worms

                     Area  Slope   Vegetation  Soil.pH    Damp  Worm.density
Nashs.Field           3.6     11    Grassland      4.1   FALSE             4
Silwood.Bottom        5.1      2       Arable      5.2   FALSE             7
Nursery.Field         2.8      3    Grassland      4.3   FALSE             2
Rush.Meadow           2.4      5       Meadow      4.9    TRUE             5
Gunness.Thicket       3.8      0        Scrub      4.2   FALSE             6
Oak.Mead              3.1      2    Grassland      3.9   FALSE             2
Church.Field          3.5      3    Grassland      4.2   FALSE             3
Ashurst               2.1      0       Arable      4.8   FALSE             4
The.Orchard           1.9      0      Orchard      5.7   FALSE             9
Rookery.Slope         1.5      4    Grassland      5.0    TRUE             7
Garden.Wood           2.9     10        Scrub      5.2   FALSE             8
North.Gravel          3.3      1    Grassland      4.1   FALSE             1
South.Gravel          3.7      2    Grassland      4.0   FALSE             2
Observatory.Ridge     1.8      6    Grassland      3.8   FALSE             0
Pond.Field            4.1      0       Meadow      5.0    TRUE             6
Water.Meadow          3.9      0       Meadow      4.9    TRUE             8
Cheapside             2.2      8        Scrub      4.7    TRUE             4
Pound.Hill            4.4      2       Arable      4.5   FALSE             5
Gravel.Pit            2.9      1    Grassland      3.5   FALSE             1
Farm.Wood             0.8     10        Scrub      5.1    TRUE             3

Notice that the field names column is not now headed by a variable name, and that the row numbers, as intended, have been suppressed.