I have a large Sweave report that reads data from a database file. Some of the columns are 1-character strings containing only +, - or NA. An example for such a table is shown below, and can be downloaded for easier testing from
http://www.menne-biomed.de/uni/test.zip (For security reasons, the file is zipped) table test hp hp1 + a - + library(RODBC) channel = odbcConnectAccess("test.mdb") ret = sqlQuery(channel,"select * from test") odbcClose(channel) str(ret) # 'data.frame': 2 obs. of 2 variables: # $ hp : num 0 0 # $ hp1: Factor w/ 2 levels "+","a": 2 1 Note that the column hp with "+" and "-" only is read as numeric 0, but when there is only other character such as in hp1, the conversion occurs. In R 2.6.2 (or was it an earlier version of RODBC?), column hp was treated as factor. Is this a new feature I have to live with, or an ... ahem ... issue? I know that with as.is I can get around this, but it need a lot of explicit programming for the columns I don't want to be as.issed Disclaimer: -- Yes, I know I should have reported this earlier, but the problem of having to re-create the report came up today. -- Yes, I should have reported this on the windows/devel r-help or directly to the author (of RODBC; or base?), so I feel guilty in advance that this is the wrong list. -- Yes, I have read the NEWS, and could not find something related. -- Yes, I cannot rule out this is a user error. Dieter --------------------------- R version 2.7.0 (2008-04-22) i386-pc-mingw32 locale: LC_COLLATE=German_Germany.1252;LC_CTYPE=German_Germany.1252;LC_MONETARY=Germ an_Germany.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=German_Germany.1252 attached base packages: [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base other attached packages: [1] RODBC_1.2-3 > > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list 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.
