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 can use as.character() on your two columns.

Example :

vec <- c(1,2,3)
> vec
[1] 1 2 3

vec <- as.character(vec)
> vec
[1] "1" "2" "3"

So just write :

datSwm[,4:5] <- as.character(datSwm[,4:5])

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

Try this :

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