title: Remove index column in read.csv
body: <p>Inspired by <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7484325/remove-index-column-in-write-csv">Prevent row names to be written to file when using write.csv</a>, I am curious if there a way to ignore the index column in R using the <code>read.csv()</code> formula.  I want to import a text file into an RMarkdown document and don't want the row numbers to show in my HTML file produced by RMarkdown.</p>
  
  <p>Running the following code</p>
  
  <pre><code>write.csv(head(cars), "cars.csv", row.names=FALSE)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>produces a CSV that looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>speed   dist
   4      2
   4      10
   7      4
   7      22
   8      16
   9      10
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But, if you read this index-less file back into R (ie, <code>read.csv("cars.csv")</code>), the index column returns:</p>
  
  <pre><code>.   speed dist
  1    4     2
  2    4     10
  3    7     4
  4    7     22
  5    8     16
  6    9     10
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I was hoping the solution would be as easy as including <code>row.names=FALSE</code> to the <code>read.csv()</code> statement, as is done with <code>write.csv()</code>, however after I run <code>read.csv("cars.csv", row.names=FALSE)</code>, R gets sassy and returns an "invalid 'row.names' specification" error message.</p>
  
  <p>I tried <code>read.csv("cars.csv")[-1]</code>, but that just dropped the speed column, not the index column.</p>
  
  <p>How do I prevent the row index from being imported?</p>