Error "incorrect file recovery" in R

Question

How in What can cause a "bad magic number"? Error loading R workspace and how to avoid it? and R has a magic number "PNG" error , I get a bad file recovery magic file error:

> load("fossilien.dat") Error: bad restore file magic number (file may be corrupted) -- no data loaded In addition: Warning message: file 'fossilien.dat' has magic number '"Samp' Use of save versions prior to 2 is deprecated 

Using the source function gives me another error (similar to an unexpected string constant ):

 > source("fossilien.dat") Error in source("fossilien.dat") : fossilien.dat:1:10: unexpected string constant 1: "Sample" "Sname" ^ 

This is especially unpleasant, since I'm sure the data source is legal - its for a home problem: ftp://stat.ethz.ch/Teaching/Datasets/WBL/fossilien.dat p>

None of the above SO questions got the proper answer, so I thought I would try again.

Some information about my R installation:

 > R.Version() $platform [1] "x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0" $version.string [1] "R version 2.15.3 (2013-03-01)" 

Answer 1

The read.table function read.table finished work: http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/utils/html/read.table.html

 > fossildata <- read.table("fossilien.dat") 

EDIT by CGW: load is for .rdata , and your fossilien.dat is an ASCII table. source executes a named file or object.