Thanks Gunter It seems that one has to know the structure of the data and adapt the read.table call accordingly. I am working on a framework that is meant to process data files with unknown structure, so I have to think a bit more about that... ________________________________ From: Bert Gunter <bgunter.4...@gmail.com> Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2019 00:08 To: Sebastien Bihorel <sebastien.biho...@cognigencorp.com> Cc: r-help@r-project.org <r-help@r-project.org> Subject: Re: [R] read.table and NaN
Like this? con <- textConnection(object = 'A,B\n1,NaN\nNA,2') > tmp <- read.table(con, header = TRUE, sep = ',', na.strings = '', > stringsAsFactors = FALSE, + colClasses = c("numeric", "character")) > close.connection(con) > tmp A B 1 1 NaN 2 NA 2 > class(tmp[,1]) [1] "numeric" > class(tmp[,2]) [1] "character" > tmp[,2] [1] "NaN" "2" Bert Gunter "The trouble with having an open mind is that people keep coming along and sticking things into it." -- Opus (aka Berkeley Breathed in his "Bloom County" comic strip ) On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 6:31 PM Sebastien Bihorel via R-help <r-help@r-project.org<mailto:r-help@r-project.org>> wrote: Hi, Is there a way to make read.table consider NaN as a string of characters rather than the internal NaN? Changing the na.strings argument does not seems to have any effect on how R interprets the NaN string (while is does not the the NA string) con <- textConnection(object = 'A,B\n1,NaN\nNA,2') tmp <- read.table(con, header = TRUE, sep = ',', na.strings = '', stringsAsFactors = FALSE) close.connection(con) tmp class(tmp[,1]) class(tmp[,2]) ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org<mailto: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. [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ 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.