Hi,
I am writing to suggest a change in write.table(). Currently one
feature of this function is so counter-intuitive that it could be
considered to be a bug. I use R 2.6.1 under Windows XP.
When appending to a file, write.table() automatically writes the column
names first, even though this means writing the variable names in the
middle of a column of numeric values. The function gives a warning but
if you have the function in a loop then usually all you will see is a
non-specific message ("there were 50 or more warnings") which can be
easy to miss. In almost all cases it would make more sense for
"col.names=TRUE" to be interpreted to mean that the function should
print the column names if it has created the file but not otherwise, I
think.
James.
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