title: How to read a ".TAB" file
body: <p>I am trying to find a way to retrieve data from Harvard Dataverse website through R.  I am using "dataverse" and "dvn" packages, among others.  Many of the data files end with ".tab", although they are not formatted as normal tab-delimited text.</p>
  
  <p>I have done this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>library(dataverse)   
  
  ## 01. Using the dataverse server and making a search
  Sys.setenv("DATAVERSE_SERVER" ="dataverse.harvard.edu")
  
  ## 02. Loading the dataset that I chose, by url
  doi_url &lt;- "https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ZTCWYQ"
  my_dataset &lt;- get_dataset(doi_url)
  
  ## 03. Grabbing the first file of the dataset
  ## which is named "001_AppendixC.tab"
  my_files &lt;- my_dataset$files$label
  my_file &lt;- get_file(my_files[1], doi_url)
  AppendixC &lt;- tempfile()
  writeBin(my_file, AppendixC)
  
  read.table(AppendixC)
  &gt; Error in scan(file = file, what = what, sep = sep, quote = quote, dec = dec,  : 
  &gt; line 1 did not have 2 elements
  &gt; In addition: Warning message:
  &gt; In read.table(AppendixC) :
  &gt; line 1 appears to contain embedded nulls
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any hint?</p>