The problem is that quotes in csv files are commonly held to me meaningless (i.e. they don't automatically force components to be strings).
Earlier this morning I committed a fix to readr so that numbers starting with a sequence of zeros are read as character strings. You may want to try out the dev version: https://github.com/hadley/readr. Hadley On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 5:00 PM, Therneau, Terry M., Ph.D. <thern...@mayo.edu> 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. > > Terry T -- http://had.co.nz/ ______________________________________________ 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.
