title: read.csv directly into character vector in R
body: <p>This code works, however, I wonder if there is a more efficient way.  I have a CSV file that has a single column of ticker symbols.  I then read this csv into R and apply functions to each ticker using a for loop.</p>
  
  <p>I read in the csv, and then go into the data frame and pull out the character vector that the for loop needs to run properly.</p>
  
  <pre><code>SymbolListDataFrame = read.csv("DJIA.csv", header = FALSE, stringsAsFactors=F)
  SymbolList = SymbolListDataFrame[[1]]
  
  for (Symbol in SymbolList){...}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there a way to combine the first two lines I have written into one? Maybe read.csv is not the best command for this?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you.</p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE</strong></p>
  
  <p>I am using the readlines method suggested by Jake and Bartek.  There is a warning "incomplete final line found on" the csv file but I ignore it since the data is correct.</p>