... The first step of data analysis or applications is reading the data sets into a tool of choice. ... Now, let?s get back to the title. read.table() [ 1 ] is a commonly used command line in R when you read in data in ascii format. ... My trick was using awk to extract those two columns because of unequal row entries in columns and read that into R. Such two steps work unfortunately made read.table() of R recognized entries as categorical data. ... Tags: ascii , format , R , read.table() , XAtlas . ...