On Jan 25, 2013, at 11:35 AM, Tim Howard wrote:
> Great point, your fix (quote="") works for the example I gave. Unfortunately,
> these text strings have commas in them as well(!). Throw a few commas in any
> of the text strings and it breaks again. Sorry about not including those in
> the example.
>
> So, I need to incorporate commas *and* quotes with the escape character
> within a single string.
Well you need to have _some_ delimiter. At the moment it sounds as though you
might end upusing readLines() and strsplit( . , split="\\'\\,\\s\\").
--
david.
>
> Tim
>
>
> >>> David Winsemius <dwinsem...@comcast.net> 1/25/2013 2:27 PM >>>
>
> On Jan 25, 2013, at 10:42 AM, Tim Howard wrote:
>
> > All,
> >
> > I have some csv files I am trying to import. I am finding that quotes
> > inside strings are escaped in a way R doesn't expect for csv files. The
> > problem only seems to rear its ugly head when there are an uneven number of
> > internal quotes. I'll try to recreate the problem:
> >
> > # set up a matrix, using escape-quote as the internal double quote mark.
> >
> > x <- data.frame(matrix(data=c("1", "string one", "another string", "2",
> > "quotes escaped 10' 20\" 5' 30\" \"test string", "final string", "3","third
> > row","last \" col"),ncol = 3, byrow=TRUE))
> >
> >> write.csv(x, "test.csv")
> >
> > # NOTE that write.csv correctly created the three internal quotes ' " ' by
> > using double quotes ' "" '.
> > # here's what got written
> >
> > "","X1","X2","X3"
> > "1","1","string one","another string"
> > "2","2","quotes escaped 10' 20"" 5' 30"" ""test string","final string"
> > "3","3","third row","last "" col"
> >
> > # Importing test.csv works fine.
> >
> >> read.csv("test.csv")
> > X X1 X2 X3
> > 1 1 1 string one another string
> > 2 2 2 quotes escaped 10' 20" 5' 30" "test string final string
> > 3 3 3 third row last " col
> > # this looks good.
> > # now, please go and open "test.csv" with a text editor and replace all the
> > double quotes '""' with the
> > # quote escaped ' \" ' as is found in my data set. Like this:
> >
> > "","X1","X2","X3"
> > "1","1","string one","another string"
> > "2","2","quotes escaped 10' 20\" 5' 30\" \"test string","final string"
> > "3","3","third row","last \" col"
>
> Use quote="":
>
> > read.csv(text='"","X1","X2","X3"
> + "1","1","string one","another string"
> + "2","2","quotes escaped 10\' 20"" 5\' 30"" ""test string","final string"
> + "3","3","third row","last "" col"', sep=",", quote="")
>
> Not ...., quote="\""
>
>
> X.. X.X1. X.X2. X.X3.
> 1 "1" "1" "string one" "another string"
> 2 "2" "2" "quotes escaped 10' 20"" 5' 30"" ""test string" "final string"
> 3 "3" "3" "third row" "last "" col"
>
> You will then be depending entirely on commas to separate.
>
> (Needed to use escaped single quotes to illustrate from a command line.)
>
> >
> > # this breaks read.csv:
> >
> >> read.csv("test.csv")
> > X X1
> > X2 X3
> > 1 1 1
> > string one another string
> > 2 2 2 quotes escaped 10' 20\\ 5' 30\\ \\test ( file://\test ) string,final
> > string\n3,3,third row,last \\ col
> >
> > # we now have only two rows, with all the data captured in col2 row2
> >
> > Any suggestions on how to fix this behavior? I've tried fiddling with
> > quote="\"" to no avail, obviously. Interestingly, an even number of escaped
> > quotes within a field is loaded correctly, which certainly threw me for a
> > while!
> >
> > Thank you in advance,
> > Tim
> >
> >
>
> David Winsemius
> Alameda, CA, USA
>
David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA
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