[R] not supressing leading zeros when reading a table?

[Marc Schwartz]

On Sun, 2005-07-10 at 18:13 +0000, Adrian Dusa wrote:
> Dear R list,
> 
> I have a dataset with a column which should be read as character, like this:
> 
>   name surname answer
> 1 xx   yyy     "00100"
> 2 rrr  hhh     "01"
> 
> When reading this dataset with read.table, I get
> 1 xx   yyy     100
> 2 rrr  hhh     1
> 
> The string column consists in answers to multiple choice questions, not all 
> having the same number of answers. I could format the answers using formatC but 
> there are over a hundred different questions in there.
> 
> I tried with quote="\"'" without any luck. Googling after this take me nowhere 
> either. It should be simple but I seem to miss it...
> Can anybody point me to the right direction?
> 
> TIA,
> Adrian

With your example data saved in a file called "test.txt":

> df <- read.table("test.txt", header = TRUE, colClasses = "character")

> df
  name surname answer
1   xx     yyy  00100
2  rrr     hhh     01

> str(df)
`data.frame':	2 obs. of  3 variables:
 $ name   : chr  "xx" "rrr"
 $ surname: chr  "yyy" "hhh"
 $ answer : chr  "00100" "01"


See the colClasses argument in ?read.table.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz