I think that Mozilla Thunderbird replaces tabs with blanks routinely. I was actually pasting from Crimson Editor but results are identical with Notepad and MS Word. However there is no problem when pasting from WinEdt:
> strength <- scan() 1: 0.023 0.032 0.054 0.069 0.081 0.094 7: 0.105 0.127 0.148 0.169 0.188 0.216 13: 0.255 0.277 0.311 0.361 0.376 0.395 19: 0.432 0.463 0.481 0.519 0.529 0.567 25: 0.642 0.674 0.752 0.823 0.887 0.926 31: Read 30 items and scanning the file directly works with or without ' sep="\t" ': > strength <- scan("C:\\Files\\Teaching\\STAT321\\tensile.dat") Read 30 items > strength <- scan("C:\\Files\\Teaching\\STAT321\\tensile.dat",sep="\t") Read 30 items I will send the file to BR (but not to the list!) Murray Jorgensen Prof Brian Ripley wrote: > No tabs are being echoed, so your cut/paste is removing the tabs. > What are you pasting from? (Not an R problem, of course.) > > On Tue, 2 May 2006, Murray Jorgensen wrote: > >> The file TENSILE.DAT from the Hand et al "Handbook of Small Data Sets" >> looks like this: >> >> 0.023 0.032 0.054 0.069 0.081 0.094 >> 0.105 0.127 0.148 0.169 0.188 0.216 >> 0.255 0.277 0.311 0.361 0.376 0.395 >> 0.432 0.463 0.481 0.519 0.529 0.567 >> 0.642 0.674 0.752 0.823 0.887 0.926 >> >> except that my mail client has replaced the tab separators by blanks. If >> I paste this data into R 2.2.1 what I get is >> >> > strength <- scan() >> 1: 0.0230.0320.0540.0690.0810.094 >> 1: 0.1050.1270.1480.1690.1880.216 >> Error in scan() : scan() expected 'a real', got >> '0.0230.0320.0540.0690.0810.094' >> > 0.2550.2770.3110.3610.3760.395 >> Error: syntax error in "0.2550.2770" >> > 0.4320.4630.4810.5190.5290.567 >> Error: syntax error in "0.4320.4630" >> > 0.6420.6740.7520.8230.8870.926 >> Error: syntax error in "0.6420.6740" >> >> Aha! I thought, what I need is scan(sep = "\t") >> but this generates the same error messages. >> >> Help! Murray >> >> > -- Dr Murray Jorgensen http://www.stats.waikato.ac.nz/Staff/maj.html Department of Statistics, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax 7 838 4155 Phone +64 7 838 4773 wk Home +64 7 825 0441 Mobile 021 1395 862 ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html