R help - May 2004 - importing text file with duplicate rows / indexing rows and columns

Could somebody advise me about importing a txt file as a frame? I am using the
command:

test <- read.delim ("~/docs/perl/expr_ctx.txt2", header=T, sep =
"\t", row.names = 1)

This gives me an error because there are duplicate rows. 

In the txt file, the columns are unique subjects and the rows are variables, so
I had planned to transform the file after importing. The first row and column
are text labels, which I could either leave in (with duplicate rows) or ask R to
remove for me, saving another file with index values. But I can't figure out
how to do either of these things.

Thanks for any help,

Graham

The issue is not `duplicate rows' but duplicated row names.  You asked R 
explicitly to make a column into row names -- if they are not suitable row 
names, don't do that.  You can remove duplicated rows later (see ?unique) 
but you cannot have duplicated row names in a data frame so leave them as 
numbers.


On Sat, 15 May 2004 grr at grell.mailshell.com wrote:
> Could somebody advise me about importing a txt file as a frame? I am using
the command:
> 
> test <- read.delim ("~/docs/perl/expr_ctx.txt2", header=T, sep
= "\t", row.names = 1)
> 
> This gives me an error because there are duplicate rows. 
> 
> In the txt file, the columns are unique subjects and the rows are
> variables, so I had planned to transform the file after importing. The
> first row and column are text labels, which I could either leave in
> (with duplicate rows) or ask R to remove for me, saving another file
> with index values. But I can't figure out how to do either of these
> things.
-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595