write.table in R screws up header when has rownames
- by Yannick Wurm
Hello,
check this example:
> a = matrix(1:9, nrow = 3, ncol = 3, dimnames = list(LETTERS[1:3], LETTERS[1:3]))
> a
A B C
A 1 4 7
B 2 5 8
C 3 6 9
the table displays correctly. There are two different ways of writing it to file...
write.csv(a, 'a.csv') which gives as expected:
"","A","B","C"
"A",1,4,7
"B",2,5,8
"C",3,6,9
and write.table(a, 'a.txt') which screws up
"A" "B" "C"
"A" 1 4 7
"B" 2 5 8
"C" 3 6 9
indeed, an empty tab is missing.... which is a pain in the butt for downstream things.
Is this a bug or a feature?
Is there a workaround? (other than write.table(cbind(rownames(a), a), 'a.txt', row.names=FALSE)
Cheers,
yannick
