It's pretty hard to answer this without the file in hand, but I'd guess something like the following is at play:
Columns of data.frame()s have to have a single type. So if R sees anything it thinks is a character, it will coerce the whole column to character. Since you have not set the first row to be a header, it's probably interpreting that as the first element of the row and recognizes it as character. This behavior is sometimes auto-rectified by read.table() or read.csv() if it sees a column without a member in the first line -- as that suggests that we have column and rownames around rectangular data -- but that doesn't seem to be happening here. What happens if you try read.table("sample.txt", header = TRUE) An alternative route, if those names are coming in as headers, would be to manually coerce the columns -- if everything is to be numeric, just wrap the call in as.numeric() Michael On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 10:18 PM, Chee Chen <chee.c...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Dear All, > I have a text file, tab delimited, called "sample.txt",as follows: > ID_REF 382 GC_Score Theta R B_Allele_Freq Log_R_Ratio > 200003 BB 0.9101527 0.9734979 0.8788951 1 0 > 200006 AB 0.6003323 0.4385073 2.033364 0.4850979 0.01553433 > > I have explored various options of the command: read.table, with one as: > read.table("sample.txt", na.strings="NA",as.is = TRUE) > > However, everything that it reads in becomes a character. > > Could you please help me on this? > Best regards, > Chee > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.