[R] read.table() and scientific notation

Gabor Grothendieck
Tue, 10 Oct 2006 10:52:59 -0000

Your example does not exhibit that behavior when I try it (below).
Can you provide a reproducible example following the style
shown here:

> Lines <- "a 1 2e-4
+ b 2 3e-8"
>
> DF <- read.table(textConnection(Lines))
> str(DF)
'data.frame':   2 obs. of  3 variables:
 $ V1: Factor w/ 2 levels "a","b": 1 2
 $ V2: int  1 2
 $ V3: num  2e-04 3e-08
> R.version.string # Windows XP
[1] "R version 2.4.0 (2006-10-03)"


On 10/10/06, January Weiner <january at uni-muenster.de>
wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I am having troubles importing values written as scientific notation
> using read.table(). I'm sure this is a frequent problem, as many
> people in my lab have this problem as well, so I'm sure that I just
> have troubles googling for the right solution.
>
> The problem is, that, given a file like that:
>
> a 1 2e-4
> b 2 3e-8
> ...
>
> the third column gets imported as a factor, or a string if I set the
> as.is parameter of read.table to TRUE for this column. However, I just
> want a simple numeric vector :-) I'm sure there is a simple trick for
> this. If you can point me to the right function, or manual, I think I
> should be able to find out the details myself.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> January
>
> --
> ------------ January Weiner 3  ---------------------+---------------
> Division of Bioinformatics, University of Muenster  |  Schlo?platz 4
> (+49)(251)8321634                                   |  D48149 M?nster
> http://www.uni-muenster.de/Biologie.Botanik/ebb/    |  Germany
>
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