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.
<therneau at 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/