Example read.table() statement to read the BHC datasets into R dataframes:
  - simply copy and paste the string below into R, changing the file location to where you have saved and unzipped the downloaded text files
  - a generic dataframe name is used below, corresponding to the naming convention of the BHC datasets
  - na.strings is used to remove the row of dashes in order to read each column's format correctly
  - comment.char and quote are used to ensure that text fields are not truncated
  - the nrows option is specified so that R allocates memory efficiently

BHCFYYMM <- read.table('file location', sep="^", nrows=1300, comment.char="", header=TRUE, quote="", na.strings="--------", as.is=TRUE)