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

[Douglas Grove]

I did read the help page, very carefully.   

The colClasses argument can be used if I want
to stop and look through every data set to see
which column I need to protect.  But that's what I 
said that I don't want to do.

As for 'as.is', I wish it did what you suggest, but
it doesn't.  If one reads carefully, as.is protects
a character vector from converstion to a *factor*,
but not from conversion to numeric/logical.

Doug




On Sun, 26 Feb 2006, Kjetil Brinchmann Halvorsen wrote:

> 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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> 
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