Reads a file in table format and creates a data frame from it, with cases corresponding to lines and variables to fields in the file.
a logical value indicating whether the file contains the names of the variables as its first line.
the field separator character. Values on each line of the file are separated by this character. If sep = "" the separator is ‘white space’, that is one or more spaces, tabs, newlines or carriage returns.
a character vector of strings which are to be interpreted as NA values. Blank fields are also considered to be missing values in logical, integer, numeric and complex fields.
Chambers, J. M. (1992) Data for models. Chapter 3 of Statistical Models in S eds J. M. Chambers and T. J. Hastie, Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.