the name of the file which the data are to be read from. Each row of the table appears as one line of the file. If it does not contain an absolute path, the file name is relative to the current working directory, getwd().

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.

a vector of row names. This can be a vector giving the actual row names, or a single number giving the column of the table which contains the row names, or character string giving the name of the table column containing the row names.

a vector of optional names for the variables. The default is to use "V" followed by the column number

the default behavior of read.table is to convert non-numeric variables to factors. The variable as.is controls this conversion. Its value is either a vector of logicals (values are recycled if necessary), or a vector of numeric indices which specify which columns should be left as character strings.

a vector strings which are to be interpreted as NA values.

the number of lines of the data file to skip before beginning to read data.