read.table() is the core function for loading files external file into R dataframes; it is part of the utils package which is automatically loaded when you start R. Aside from the header argument, the sep and quote arguments define the field separators. The read.csv() function is a wrapper function around read.table specifically for comma-separated values: it simply assigns sep = "," and quote = "\"". The read.delim() function is a also a wrapper around read.table: it assigns sep = "\t", quote = "\"", where \t is a special character representing a TAB.
