read.table function in R drops elements [duplicate]

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Closed 9 years ago.

Possible Duplicate:
cannt read file with “#” and space using read.table or read.csv in R

I have the problem with R that when I'm reading in (using read.table function) delimited files (e.g. tab-delimited text files) with R, the rows containing # or ' characters are silently dropped. how the file should be read in so that the rows containing these characters aren't dropped?

Answer 1

The default comment.char is the # character. You can change this using the comment.char argument, i.e.

read.table(file, comment.char="@")
read.table(file, comment.char="##")