[R] read.table() and scientific notation

January Weiner
Tue, 10 Oct 2006 10:43:55 -0000

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  ---------------------+---------------
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http://www.uni-muenster.de/Biologie.Botanik/ebb/    |  Germany