R help - Oct 2010 - RODBC: forcing a special column to be read in as character

Dear R-users,

I am working with R version 2.10.1 and package RODBC Version: 1.3-2 under
windows.

Say I have a table "testtable" (in an Access data base), which has
many different columns, among them a character column "X" with
"integer-like" data as "0012345".
Using sqlFetch, I'd like to assure that column X is read in as a character
variable. So what I'm looking for is something between these two approaches:
> sqlFetch(channel, "testtable") # -> column X is automatically
converted to character (so 0012345 becomes 12345)
> sqlFetch(channel, "testtable", as.is = TRUE) # -> all columns
are converted to character
I guess I'm looking for something like argument "colClasses" in
function "read.table", is there a something similar in RODBC?

Your advice is appreciated;
kind regards
Heinrich.

I've had the same problem and ended up using the xlsReadWrite package.  It
takes more time to import a sheet but does have the colClasses command.

Following your example:

library(xlsReadWrite)
read.xls("testtable", sheet = "sheet1",
colClasses="character")

should worked, it did for me

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