handling octals generated by importData

["Jonathan Dakin" <jdakin@overwey.demon.co.uk>]

Could I ask if anyone's come up against handling octal characters generated by importing data from excel files.  Excel sheets seem to be littered with invisible control codes, both inside apparently empty cells, and prefixed to data within cells. 

When such data is imported into S using importData, such fields as "\240\240\240\240\240" or "\001\240" pop up.  (I've previously attached a sample file with code on a previous posting:

http://www.biostat.wustl.edu/archives/html/s-news/2005-12/msg00061.html

I'm trying to write code to weed out these nonsense characters.  However, they don't handle in the normal way.  Each is preceded by "\", which would be an obvious marker for all such fields.  But substring (x,1,1) returns "\240", making a generic identification, which would fit all possible octals impossible.  (An is.octal function would be nice !)  Does anyone know of another approach to this ?  Many thanks.  (I'm using Splus 6.1 under W2K).

Jonathan Dakin
Portsmouth Hospital UK