On 22/09/2015 6:33 PM, Rolf Turner wrote: > On 23/09/15 10:00, Therneau, Terry M., Ph.D. wrote: >> I have a csv file from an automatic process (so this will happen >> thousands of times), for which the first row is a vector of variable >> names and the second row often starts something like this: >> >> 5724550,"000202075214",2005.02.17,2005.02.17,"F", ..... >> >> Notice the second variable which is >> a character string (note the quotation marks) >> a sequence of numeric digits >> leading zeros are significant >> >> The read.csv function insists on turning this into a numeric. Is there >> any simple set of options that >> will turn this behavior off? I'm looking for a way to tell it to "obey >> the bloody quotes" -- I still want the first, third, etc columns to >> become numeric. There can be more than one variable like this, and not >> always in the second position. >> >> This happens deep inside the httr library; there is an easy way for me >> to add more options to the read.csv call but it is not so easy to >> replace it with something else. > > IMHO this is a bug in read.csv().
No, it's a bug in "Rolf Turner", who believes in fairies at the end of his garden, rather than in documentation for file formats. Duncan Murdoch > > A possible workaround: > > ccc <- c("integer","character",rep(NA,k)) > X <- read.csv("melvin.csv",colClasses=ccc) > > where "melvin.csv" is the file from which you are attempting to read and > where k+2 = the number of columns in that file. > > Kludgey, but it might work. > > Another workaround is to specify quote="", but this has the side effect > of making the 5th column character rather than logical. > > cheers, > > Rolf > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.