If you really did quote="", then you don't have any quote character and it won't work. But that's probably some kind of markdown error. The default in read.table is to allow both double and single quotes, while the default in read.csv is to only allow single quotes; I find that if I change your argument to quote="\"" to allow only double quotes, then it reads it with no errors. Another difference between read.table and read.csv is that read.table defaults to allowing # comments, which mangles one of the lines. This can be fixed with comment.char="", at which point read.csv and read.table produce the same result.