[R] read.table() and scientific notation

mmiller3
Wed, 11 Oct 2006 13:42:32 -0000

>>>>> "January" == January Weiner <january at
uni-muenster.de> writes:

    > 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
    > ...

Note: this is advocacy for education in clear quantitative
language and is a border-line off topic rant...

The other day I read a paper from a student who used notation
like 2e-4 in the text - blech!  I sent it back for revisions.
Lately I have noticed here and in other places this tendency to
use floating point notation (also referred to as exponential
notation) where scientific notation is appropriate, and vice
versa.  The notation 2e-4 is a convenient way to express floating
point numbers with a simple text string, but it is certainly not
scientific notation.  No wonder you had trouble googling it!

Mike