I am trying to read in a variance-covariance matrix written out by LISREL in the following format in a plain text, whitespace separated file: 0.23675E+01 0.86752E+00 0.28675E+01 -0.36190E+00 -0.36190E+00 0.25381E+01 -0.32571E+00 -0.32571E+00 0.84425E+00 0.25598E+01 -0.37680E+00 -0.37680E+00 0.53136E+00 0.47822E+00 0.21120E+01 -0.37680E+00 -0.37680E+00 0.53136E+00 0.47822E+00 0.91200E+00 0.21120E+01 This is actually a lower diagonal matrix (including diagonal): 0.23675E+01 0.86752E+00 0.28675E+01 -0.36190E+00 -0.36190E+00 0.25381E+01 -0.32571E+00 -0.32571E+00 0.84425E+00 0.25598E+01 -0.37680E+00 -0.37680E+00 0.53136E+00 0.47822E+00 0.21120E+01 -0.37680E+00 -0.37680E+00 0.53136E+00 0.47822E+00 0.91200E+00 0.21120E+01 I can read in the values correctly with scan() or read.table(fill=T). I am however not able to correctly store the read-in vector in a matrix. The following code S <- diag(6) S[lower.tri(S,diag=T)] <- d fills the lower matrix by column, while it should fill it by row. Using matrix() does allow for the option byrow=TRUE, but this will fill in the whole matrix, not just the lower half (with diagonal). Is it possible to have both: only fill the lower matrix (with diagonal) and do it by row? (separate issue I'm having: LISREL uses 'D+01' while R only recognises 'E+01' for scientific notation. Can you change this in R to accept also 'D'?)