[R] can I do this with read.table??

[Kjetil Brinchmann Halvorsen]

Douglas Grove wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to figure out if there's an automated way to get
> read.table to read in my data and *not* convert the character
> columns into anything, just leave them alone.  What I'm referring

?Did you read the help page?
What about argument as.is=TRUE?
See also argument colClasses

Kjetil

> to as 'character columns' are columns in the data that are quoted.
> For columns of alphabetic strings (that aren't TRUE or FALSE) I can
> suppress conversion to factor with as.is=TRUE, but what I'd like to
> stop is the conversion of quoted numbers of the form "01","02",..., 
> into numeric form.
>  
> By an 'automated way', I mean one that does not involve me having
> to know which columns in the data are the ones I want kept as
> they are.
> 
> This doesn't seem like an unreasonable thing to want to do.
> After all, say I've got the data.frame:
> 
>   A <- data.frame(a=1:3, b=I(c("01","02","03")))
> 
> I can export this to a text file with the simple command
> 
>   write.table(A, "A.txt", sep="\t", row.names=FALSE, quote=TRUE)
> 
> but I cannot find an equally simple mechanism for reading this
> data back in from A.txt that allows me to reconstruct my
> data.frame 'A'.  Is this an unreasonable thing to expect?
> 
> Thanks,
> Doug
> 
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