R help - Nov 2008 - Prevent read.table from converting "+" and "-" to 0

I am using read.table("data.txt", sep="\t") to read in a
tab-limited text file. However, two columns of data were read wrongly.
read.table converts "+" and "-" in the two columns to 0. I
have tried setting other parameters but to no avail.

TIA
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On 11/4/2008 9:08 AM, Daren Tan wrote:
> I am using read.table("data.txt", sep="\t") to read in
a tab-limited text file. However, two columns of data were read wrongly.
read.table converts "+" and "-" in the two columns to 0. I
have tried setting other parameters but to no avail.
Set the column classes (using the colClasses argument).  It is guessing 
numeric, but clearly that's not true.

Duncan Murdoch

Daren Tan <daren76 <at> hotmail.com> writes:
> I am using read.table("data.txt", sep="\t") to read in
a tab-limited text
file. However, two columns of
> data were read wrongly. read.table converts "+" and "-"
in the two columns to
0. I have tried setting other
> parameters but to no avail. 
Looks like 

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.r.general/112819

which was corrected by Brian Ripley a few hours after being reported.

Dieter