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(). Tilde-expansion is performed where supported. This can be a compressed file (see file). Alternatively, file can be a readable text-mode connection (which will be opened for reading if necessary, And if so closed (And hence destroyed) at the end of the function call). (If stdin() Is used, the prompts for lines may be somewhat confusing. Terminate input with a blank line Or an EOF signal, Ctrl-D on Unix And Ctrl-Z on Windows. Any pushback on stdin() will be cleared before return.) file can also be a complete URL. (For the supported URL schemes, see the 'URLs’ section of the help for url.)

encoding to be assumed for input strings. It is used to mark character strings as known to be in Latin-1 or UTF-8 (see Encoding): it is not used to re-encode the input, but allows R to handle encoded strings in their native encoding (if one of those two). use Encoding.Default by default.

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.

If there Is a header And the first row contains one fewer field than the number Of columns, the first column In the input Is used For the row names. Otherwise If row.names Is missing, the rows are numbered.

Using row.names = NULL forces row numbering. Missing Or NULL row.names generate row names that are considered To be 'automatic’ (and not preserved by as.matrix).