R Treats "Na" (Neuroacanthocytosis) Genes As Missing Value !! How To Overcome The Problem?

Question

[raunakms]

I've a table with HUGO gene symbols in it. When I load the table in R using read.table(), one of the genes in the list NA (neuroacanthocytosis) is treated as a missing value. I would like NA to be as a normal character string rather than a missing value. I've tried to convert NA to a normal text/character but I've not been successful yet. And I did not find any of such problems mentioned previously in any forums. How can we overcome this issue?

Answer 1

[Michael]

When using read.table change the na.strings = "NA" parameter, and set it to smth else than "NA". Read ?read.table