read.csv falsly converts string to integer

Question

I would like to read a csv file but there are columns that contain strings of digits (string variable). The values in the csv file are quoted (\"\") so easily identifyable as st

Answer 1

You could use the read.csv argument: colClasses

colClasses describes the content of the columns (see ?read.csv).

below an example for the first five columns: you need to drop stringAsFactors (it would be overridden by colClasses)

datSwm <- read.csv("datSwm.csv", header=T, quote='\"', 
colClasses = c("factor", "numeric", "character", "character", "character") )

You will need to add more details for the remaining columns.