On May 4, 2011, at 5:57 AM, Ben Bolker wrote:

smoff <simon.frey <at> boku.ac.at> writes:

My problem is that I have a table containing dates in the first column of 10 years. These dates have the format ddmmYYYY at least in the csv- file. After importing the file using read.table() R deletes the first character if it is
a zero.

[snip]

How do I solve this problem? Is there a way to tell R not to delete the first character even if it is a zero or to directly read the first column as
date?

See the "colClasses" argument of ?read.table ...

(added a little bit of text to make gmane happy)

I've had similar problems and this was my first strategy:

> test <- c('1241949', '5182001','12252009')
> ifelse(nchar(test)==7, paste("0", test, sep=""), test)
[1] "01241949" "05182001" "12252009"

I then used colClasses, and later simply asked to have all dates in the output format from the database changed to "YYYY-mm-dd".


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