# ERROR: LoadError: ArgumentError: unknown option delim

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/error-loaderror-argumenterror-unknown-option-delim/7143>\
**Category:** New to Julia\
**Created:** [November 17, 2017, 10:59pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/error-loaderror-argumenterror-unknown-option-delim/7143 "2017-11-17T22:59:04Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![gtollefson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/0ea827/32.png) [@gtollefson](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/gtollefson)\
**Post date:** [November 17, 2017, 10:59pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/error-loaderror-argumenterror-unknown-option-delim/7143/1 "2017-11-17T22:59:04Z")

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Hi,

I’m trying to load a tab delimited file using the following code:

`vcf=readdlm("/Users/George/Desktop/work_projects/Sept2017_24patients_visualize/24patients_edit_test.vcf", delim="\t")`

and receive the following error:

> ERROR: LoadError: ArgumentError: unknown option delim

I’m using Julia v6.0. Does anyone know why this may be happening?

Thanks!

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**Author:** ![dpsanders](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/dpsanders/32/3573_2.png) [@dpsanders](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/dpsanders)\
**Post date:** [November 17, 2017, 11:31pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/error-loaderror-argumenterror-unknown-option-delim/7143/2 "2017-11-17T23:31:22Z")

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If you look at the help of `readdlm`, you can see (though maybe not that clearly) that `delim` is not a keyword argument, and that it is of type `Char`. So it is used as follows:

```julia
julia> writedlm("test.dat", rand(4,4), '\t')

julia> X = readdlm("test.dat", '\t')
4×4 Array{Float64,2}:
 0.305406 0.541672 0.340519 0.905203
 0.563587 0.0495975 0.921599 0.820904
 0.259678 0.532443 0.717672 0.297311
 0.388682 0.482047 0.0025142 0.82242

```

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![gtollefson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/0ea827/32.png) [@gtollefson](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/gtollefson)\
**Post date:** [November 18, 2017, 2:14am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/error-loaderror-argumenterror-unknown-option-delim/7143/3 "2017-11-18T02:14:02Z")

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Thank you very much @dpsanders. I read the doc/ looked at the help and saw that, but wasn’t sure how to interpret it. Julia is my first programming language so I’m still pretty green at this.

My program is running now!