On Sun, 2007-07-22 at 21:51 -0700, Stephen Tucker wrote: > It turns out that "-" and " " (space) are not valid variable names.
They are valid names, the problem is that they aren't very convenient to use, as the OP discovered, because they need to be quoted. Note that if using something like read.csv or read.table, R will correct these problem variable names for you when you import the data. If you read this file in for example: "Mydata","S-sharif","A site" 1,45,34 2,66,45 3,79,56 using read.csv, you get easy to use names > dat <- read.csv("temp.csv") > dat Mydata S.sharif A.site 1 1 45 34 2 2 66 45 3 3 79 56 You can turn off this safety checking using the argument check.names = FALSE G -- %~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~% Gavin Simpson [t] +44 (0)20 7679 0522 ECRC, UCL Geography, [f] +44 (0)20 7679 0565 Pearson Building, [e] gavin.simpsonATNOSPAMucl.ac.uk Gower Street, London [w] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfagls/ UK. WC1E 6BT. [w] http://www.freshwaters.org.uk %~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~% ______________________________________________ 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 and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.