On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 8:52 AM, Matthew DeAngelis <roni...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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? >
See the read.table check.names argument. -- Statistics & Software Consulting GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc. tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com ______________________________________________ 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.