I would caution against using attach(), however, if you are not in an interactive session. In functions and scripts, errors can often cause the interpreter to exit before the detach(), leaving your data on the search path. 99% of all attach/detach cases can be handled by ?with and ?within. The issue with attach can be seen in this example:
dat <- data.frame(a = 1, b = 2) test <- function(x){ attach(dat) if(x) stop("STOP") print(a) print(b) detach(dat) } a test(F) a a test(T) a On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 3:13 PM, stephen's mailinglist account <stephen4mailingli...@googlemail.com> wrote: >>> My data is a 2 column 8000 row table (saved as .txt file) imported into >>> R. >>> >>>>demand=read.delim("C:\\Documents and Settings\\E066582\\My >>> Documents\\R\\R-2.13.0\\bin\\demand.txt") >>> >>> First rows with headers are as shown: >>> >>>> demand[1,] >>> >>> Date Qty >>> >>> 1 12/31/2006 1 >>> >>> With two columns Date/Qty. >>> >>> I attempted to plot and received an error. My headers were not found as >>> an object in R...maybe I'm missing something, but I was under the >>> impression I didn't need to create each header as an object... >>> >>>> plot(Qty, Date) >>> >>> Error in plot(Qty, Date) : object 'Qty' not found >>> >>>> plot(Date, Qty) >>> >>> Error in plot(Date, Qty) : object 'Date' not found > >> You need to tell R where to find them, since they aren't R objects. >> (You can see all the actual objects with ls().) >> >> Two of the many options: >> >> with(demand, plot(Qty, Date)) >> >> plot(demand$Qty, demand$Date) > > > does it help to tell R that there is a header row in the file? > demand<-read.delim("path\\demand.txt", header=TRUE) > > if you want to address Qty and Date directly you could attach (other > options were given above) > attach(demand) > then > plot(Qty, Date) > should work > -- > Stephen > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > -- =============================================== Jon Daily Technician =============================================== #!/usr/bin/env outside # It's great, trust me. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.