Fill lower matrix with vector by row, not column

Question

I am trying to read in a variance-covariance matrix written out by LISREL in the following format in a plain text, whitespace separated file:

 0.23675E+01  0         


        

Answer 1

Just read it into the upper triangular portion, rather than the lower:

S <- diag(6)
S[upper.tri(S, diag=TRUE)] <- d
t(S)