[Rd] read.table bug in Mac OS X (PR#2469)

[gwgilc@wm.edu]

Full_Name: George W. Gilchrist
Version: 1.6.2
OS: OS X
Submission from: (NULL) (128.239.124.126)


Start with a tab-delimited or comma-delimited text file created on the Mac and
use read.table("filename.txt", header=T) to read it in. When the first column of
the file contains a character vector, and there is a header line, the first
letter of the first column of the fifth row is appended to the start of the
column name and is omitted from the data entry. See the example below. This
appears to have something to do with the way text files are encoded on the Mac.
Text flies created in Excel, emacs, Word, and TextEdit on OS X all seem to do
this, even when you copy the text file over to a PC and run R 1.6.2 there under
Windows. If you open the Mac text file in a text editor on the PC and save it
under a different name, the problem goes away. I have tried this with a half
dozen different files. 

> tmp1<-read.table("deadFly.txt", header=T)
> tmp1[1:10,]
   VTrt Dead.X Dead.C Live.X Live.C N.X N.C P.Live.X P.Live.C
1    Vg      2      0      7     10   9  10     0.78    1.000
2    Vg      5      1      5      8  10   9     0.50    0.890
3    Vg      0      0      8     10   8  10     1.00    1.000
4    Vg      0      0      9      9   9   9     1.00    1.000
5     g      1      1      9      7  10   8     0.90    0.875
6    Vg      4      1      6      9  10  10     0.60    0.900
7    Vg      2      1      7      9   9  10     0.78    0.900
8    Vg      0      0      9      8   9   8     1.00    1.000
9    Vg      0      0     10     10  10  10     1.00    1.000
10   Vg      0      0      8      9   8   9     1.00    1.000

> tmp2<-read.table("musselJen.txt", header=T)
> tmp2[1:10,]
   LLoc  Size ID Bac Sec    N   PC
1    LS 120.0  1   T   1 32.7 92.0
2    LS 120.0  1   T   2 33.3 92.5
3    LS 120.0  1   T   3 39.3 96.9
4    LS 120.0  2   T   1 36.1 94.3
5     S 120.0  2   T   2 38.3 94.5
6    LS 120.0  2   T   3 34.3 94.1
7    LS 120.0  3   T   1 22.1 83.9
8    LS 120.0  3   T   2 25.5 93.1
9    LS 120.0  3   T   3 28.7 94.6
10   LS   4.2  1   T   1 48.5 93.7
>