How to read data when some numbers contain commas as thousand separator?

Question

I have a csv file where some of the numerical values are expressed as strings with commas as thousand separator, e.g. \"1,513\" instead of 1513. Wh

Answer 1

I think preprocessing is the way to go. You could use Notepad++ which has a regular expression replace option.

For example, if your file were like this:

"1,234","123","1,234"
"234","123","1,234"
123,456,789

Then, you could use the regular expression "([0-9]+),([0-9]+)" and replace it with \1\2

1234,"123",1234
"234","123",1234
123,456,789

Then you could use x <- read.csv(file="x.csv",header=FALSE) to read the file.