Changes in the headers when I read files in R?

Question

Whenever I read in a file using read.csv() with option header=T, the headers change in weird (but predictable) ways. A header name which ought to r

Answer 1

Not really intended as an answer, but intended to be helpful to Rnewbs: Those headers were read in as factors (and caused the third column to also be a factor. The screwy names() assignments probably used their integer storage mode. @Andrie has already given you the preferred solution, but if you wanted to just reassign the names (which would not undo the damage to the thrid column) you could use:

 names(myfile1) <- scan(file=fullpath, what="character" nmax=1 , sep="\t")
 myfile1 <- myfile[-1, ]    # gets rid of unneeded line

Answer 2

Set check.names=FALSE in read.csv()

read.csv(fullpath,sep="\t", header=FALSE, nrow=3, check.names=FALSE)

From the help for ?read.csv:

check.names

logical. If TRUE then the names of the variables in the data frame are checked to ensure that they are syntactically valid variable names. If necessary they are adjusted (by make.names) so that they are, and also to ensure that there are no duplicates.