Hi Chris,
Yes, you're missing something: the colClasses argument to read.csv.
Given a tiny little csv file that looks like this:
1,2,3,"01234"
4,5,6,"00011"
7,8,0,"00000"
> testdata <- read.csv("testdata.csv", header=FALSE, colClasses=c(NA, NA, NA,
> "character"))
> testdata
V1 V2 V3 V4
1 1 2 3 01234
2 4 5 6 00011
3 7 8 0 00000
> str(testdata)
'data.frame': 3 obs. of 4 variables:
$ V1: int 1 4 7
$ V2: int 2 5 8
$ V3: int 3 6 0
$ V4: chr "01234" "00011" "00000"
That should do what you want.
Not that you should need it, but sprintf() is a neater way to pad out
numeric to character values:
> sprintf("%05d", 12)
[1] "00012"
> sprintf("%05d", 1223)
[1] "01223"
> sprintf("%07d", 12)
[1] "0000012"
>
Hope that solves your problem,
Sarah
On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 8:24 PM, Chris Conner <connerpha...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Dear Help-Rs,
>
> I've been dealing with this problem for some time, using a work-around to
> deal with it. It's time for me to come clean with my ineptitude and seek a
> what has got to be a more streamlined solution from the Help-Rverse.
>
> I regularly import delimited text data that contains numerics enclosed in
> quotes (e.g., "00765288071"). Thing is, for some of these data, I need to
> keep the values as "character" class within the data frame (that is to say
> the leading zeros are important and I would like them to stay). Here is an
> example of the code I would use to read an example dataset in question:
>
> mydata <- read.csv("~/mydata.csv", quote = "\"'")
>
> The problem is, when R reads the data and converts them into a data frame,
> inevitably, R ignores the quotes around values like the above, and reads them
> in as "numeric". So R strips the valuable leading zeros and converts my
> "00765288071" to 765288071. I've developed a work-arounds to this involving
> the use of the following:
>
>> whatIneed <- "00000000000"
>> whatIgot <- 765288071
>> whatIgot <- as.character(whatIgot)
>> substr(whatIneed, 1+nchar(whatIneed)-nchar(whatIgot), nchar(whatIneed)) <-
>> whatIgot
>> whatIneed
> [1] "00765288071"
>
> My question is, am I missing something in how I'm writing my read.csv
> statement that would indicate to R that numerics enclosed in quotes should be
> read and imported as characters and not converted to numerics???
>
--
Sarah Goslee
http://www.functionaldiversity.org
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