Brilliant! Thank you both, this works! Combined with the other suggestion of setting stringsAsFactors to FALSE when reading in the data frame, I now have the behaviour I wanted.
I had been beginning to get the sense that one of the apply functions was the solution. I will now do some reading on split to understand precisely what I'm doing... Best wishes, Anne -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/reading-in-a-very-simple-list-from-a-file-tp4645741p4645839.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ 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.
