This has nothing to do with finance, so you should have posted it to R-help instead.
The answer to your question is found in "An Introduction to R", section 1.8: R commands, case sensitivity, etc. "... a name must start with '.' or a letter, and if it starts with '.' the second character must not be a digit." Technically, you can assign a value to a name that starts with a number, but you will run into lots of problems. Best, -- Joshua Ulrich | about.me/joshuaulrich FOSS Trading | www.fosstrading.com R/Finance 2013: Applied Finance with R | www.RinFinance.com On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 5:48 PM, Wei-han Liu <weihanliu2...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Hi R users: > > I tried the following coding: > COMPdata <- read.csv("D:/........./Book1.csv", header=TRUE, sep=",") > INDEX <- COMPdata[, 1] > 1M <- COMPdata[, 2] > 2M <- COMPdata[, 3] > > The partial list of original data Book1.csv is listed below: > INDEX 1M 2M 3M 4M > 1 0.0001026472 0.0001026472 0.0001427507 0.0001026147 > 2 0.0001026109 0.0001026109 0.0001453323 0.0001029040 > 3 0.0001169544 0.0001169544 0.0001326488 0.0001070135 > 4 0.0001159930 0.0001159930 0.0001362505 0.0001048737 > 5 0.0001212301 0.0001212301 0.0001320264 0.0001139550 > 6 0.0001211852 0.0001211852 0.0001247280 0.0001137742 > > The dataset read-in looks fine: >> head(COMPdata) > INDEX X1M X2M X3M X4M > 1 1 0.0001026472 0.0001026472 0.0001427507 0.0001026147 > 2 2 0.0001026109 0.0001026109 0.0001453323 0.0001029040 > 3 3 0.0001169544 0.0001169544 0.0001326488 0.0001070135 > 4 4 0.0001159930 0.0001159930 0.0001362505 0.0001048737 > 5 5 0.0001212301 0.0001212301 0.0001320264 0.0001139550 > 6 6 0.0001211852 0.0001211852 0.0001247280 0.0001137742 > > Nothing wrong with the first column: >> INDEX <- COMPdata[, 1] > > However, it gives me the error message below >> 1M <- COMPdata[, 2] > Error: Unexpected symbol in "1M" > > So do the other variables 2M, 3M, and 4M. > > > Could some people share advice to solve this problem? > > Thanks for your kind attention. > > Weihan > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > > _______________________________________________ > R-SIG-Finance@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-finance > -- Subscriber-posting only. If you want to post, subscribe first. > -- Also note that this is not the r-help list where general R questions > should go. _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Finance@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-finance -- Subscriber-posting only. If you want to post, subscribe first. -- Also note that this is not the r-help list where general R questions should go.