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# R read.table() Function - Reading Table Files [ R Language Examples](https://example.com/r/r-examples.html) R read.table() function is the underlying generic version of read.csv(), used to read delimiter-separated text files. read.table() can handle various delimiter-separated file formats, such as TSV (tab-separated), fixed-width, etc. The syntax of read.table() function is as follows: read.table(file, header = FALSE, sep = "", dec = ".", comment.char = "#", na.strings = "NA") **Parameter Description:** * **file** File path. * **header** Whether the first row is used as column names. * **sep** Delimiter, empty string means whitespace separator. * **comment.char** Comment character, lines starting with this character are ignored. * **na.strings** Strings to be treated as NA values. ## Example # Write tab-separated file write.table(mtcars[1:5, 1:3], "temp_mtcars.tsv", sep ="\t", row.names= FALSE) # View original content print("TSV file content:") cat(readLines("temp_mtcars.tsv"), sep =" ") # Read tab-separated file data<-read.table("temp_mtcars.tsv", header = TRUE, sep ="\t") print(" Data read back:") print(data) Executing the above code outputs: "TSV file content:""mpg" "cyl" "disp""21" "6" "160""21" "6" "160""22.8" "4" "108""21.4" "6" "258""18.7" "8" "360" "Data read back:" mpg cyl disp 1 21.0 6 1602 21.0 6 1603 22.8 4 1084 21.4 6 2585 18.7 8 360 [ R Language Examples](https://example.com/r/r-examples.html)