title: Data type error with scan
body: <p>I have a .dat file of time series data for options so it includes trade date and expiration date, in addition to the price data for which I want to do timeseries analysis in R.
  I am new to R, so I have been following some of the examples online. in my attempt to upload the data as a data-frame, I tried the scan(), but I get the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  : 
    scan() expected 'a real', got '2010-Aug-09,2011-Aug-19,C00026000,0.23985,5.53,0.999999,0.00712328'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I understand it is expecting real but I need to enter the dates and the option ticker to make sense of the time series, so can someone give me some guidance on how I go about it.thx.</p>