I have the following problem. It is not of earthshaking importance, but still I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about it.
PROBLEM: Is there any way I can have a single textfile that contains both a) data b) programcode The program should act on the data, if the textfile is source()'ed into R. BOUNDARY CONDITION: I want the data written in the textfile in exactly the same format as I would use, if I had data in a separate textfile, to be read by read.table(). That is, with 'horizontal inhomogeneity' and 'vertical homogeneity' in the type of entries. I want to write something like Sex Respons Male 1 Male 2 Female 3 Female 4 In effect, I am asking if there is some way I can convince read.table(), that the data is contained in the following n lines of text. ILLEGAL SOLUTIONS: I know I can simulate the behaviour by reading the columns of the dataframe one by one, and using data.frame() to glue them together. Like in data.frame(Sex = c('Male', 'Male', 'Female', 'Female'), Respons = c(1, 2, 3, 4)) I do not like this solution, because it represents the data in a "transposed" way in the textfile, and this transposition makes the structure of the dataframe less transparent - at least to me. It becomes even less comprehensible if the Sex-factor above is written with the help of rep() or gl() or the like. I know I can make read.table() read from stdin, so I could type the dataframe at the prompt. That is against the spirit of the problem, as I describe below. I know I can make read.table() do the job, if I split the data and the programcode in to different files. But as the purpose of the exercise is to distribute the data and the code to other people, splitting into several files is a complication. MOTIVATION: I frequently find myself distributing small chunks of code to my students, along with data on which the code can work. As an example, I might want to demonstrate how model.matrix() treats interactions, in a certain setting. For that I need a dataframe that is complex enough to exhibit the behaviour I want, but still so small that the model.matrix is easily understood. So I make such a dataframe. I am trying to distribute this dataframe along with my code, in a way that is as simple as possible to USE for the students (hence the one-file boundary condition) and to READ (hence the non-transposition boundary condition). Does anybody have any ideas? Ernst Hansen Department of Statistics University of Copenhagen ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help