The Art of R Programming

Default Values for Arguments

In Section 5.1.2., we read in a data set from a file named exams:

> testscores <- read.table("exams",header=TRUE)

The argument header=TRUE tells R that we have a header line, so R should not count that first line in the file as data.

This is an example of the use of named arguments. Here are the first few lines of the function:

> read.table function (file, header = FALSE, sep = "", quote = "\"'", dec = ".", row.names, col.names, as.is = !stringsAsFactors, na.strings = "NA", colClasses = NA, nrows = −1, skip = 0, check.names = TRUE, fill = !blank.lines.skip, strip.white = FALSE, blank.lines.skip = TRUE, comment.char = "#", allowEscapes = FALSE, flush = FALSE, stringsAsFactors = default.stringsAsFactors(), encoding = "unknown") ...