Question

I am fairly new to R. I have a datafile which has a matrix of complex numbers, each of the form 123+123i, when I try to read in the data in R, using read.table(), it returns strings, which is not what I want. Is there some way to read in a file of complex numbers?

One possible thing that I could do, since the program that generates the matrix is available to me, I can modify it to generate two real numbers instead of a single complex number, and after reading into R, I can make them into a single complex number, now would this be the canonical way to doing what I want?

Answer 1

See ?read.table, in particular you want to use the colClasses="complex" argument.