R devel - Nov 2005 - Scan data from a .txt file

Hi all,
Am trying to read data from a .txt file in such a way that i can access the
column names too. For example, the data in the table.txt file is as below:
 Name Weight Height Gender
Anne 150 65 F
Rob 160 68 M
George 180 65 M
Greg 205 69 M
 i used the following commands:
 data<-scan("table.txt",list("",0,0,0),sep="")
a<-data[[1]]
b<-data[[2]]
c<-data[[3]]
d<-data[[4]]
 But this doesn't work because of type mismatch. I want to pull the col
names also into the respective lists. For example i want 'b' to have
(weight,150,160,180,205) so that i can access the col name and also the
induvidual weights. I tried using the read.table method too, but couldn't
get this working. Can someone suggest a way to do this.
Thanks,
Vasu.

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On 11/17/2005 10:35 AM, Vasundhara Akkineni wrote:
> Hi all,
> Am trying to read data from a .txt file in such a way that i can access the
> column names too. For example, the data in the table.txt file is as below:
>  Name Weight Height Gender
> Anne 150 65 F
> Rob 160 68 M
> George 180 65 M
> Greg 205 69 M
>  i used the following commands:
> 
data<-scan("table.txt",list("",0,0,0),sep="")
> a<-data[[1]]
> b<-data[[2]]
> c<-data[[3]]
> d<-data[[4]]
>  But this doesn't work because of type mismatch. I want to pull the col
> names also into the respective lists. For example i want 'b' to
have
> (weight,150,160,180,205) so that i can access the col name and also the
> induvidual weights. I tried using the read.table method too, but
couldn't
> get this working. Can someone suggest a way to do this.
You probably want to use read.table("table.txt", head=TRUE).  Chances 
are it will automatically recognize the column types; if not, there's 
the colClasses argument.

Duncan Murdoch