Hi all, I am hoping that someone can help me with a problem I am having with column headings. I have read a table into R using read.table: the rows are documents, and the columns are counts of regular expression matches (so that the column heading is the given regular expression). My problem is that read.table seems to be trying to interpret the regular expressions, or has trouble with the special characters, so that the column headings are not coming out correctly. For example, a column headed with: \bV\.?A\.?T\.? will come out as X.bV...A...T... This would not be a problem, since the regular expressions are still readable, except that I have a number of other tables that I will need to intersect with these column headings. In some of those tables, the regular expressions are data, and they are coming in correctly (although R seems to be doubling "\"s, which is fine so long as it does this consistently).
I have also tried importing the column names as a vector and specifying that vector explicitly using col.names, but R still transforms the provided names as above. Is it possible to force R to read in regular expressions completely literally, with no interpretation? Alternately, can I force R to interpret the column headings in the same way that it interprets data (i.e. adding the extra slash), so that I can match on these values? Thanks, Matt [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.