Question

I try to use “#” as the field separator to reading file into a data frame. But it looks like R can not recognize it. Why I can not use “#” as the field separator?

Thanks

Answer 1

See ?read.table. You need to alter the comment.char argument as this is over-riding your attempts to set the delimiter to #.

Try read.table(foo.txt, sep = "#", comment.char = "")

Setting comment.char = "" turns of interpretation of comments (from ?read.table()):

comment.char: character: a character vector of length one containing a
single character or an empty string. Use "" to turn off
the interpretation of comments altogether.