[R] import csv file into R, strange problem

[Rainer M Krug]

On Wed 14 Sep 2011 10:37:46 CEST, Uwe Ligges wrote:
>
>
> On 14.09.2011 10:28, Rainer M Krug wrote:
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>> On 13/09/11 18:08, bonnieyuan wrote:
>>> Hi, I used read.csv(file name, header=T, sep=",") to bring in a csv
>>> file I saved in MS Excel. The strange thing is all the data ended
>>> up in one big column. The number of rows match with the number of
>>> observations, but all the variables got squeezed into one column.
>>> Also the first row where the header is, the variables names have a
>>> dot between them, replacing the comma that's in the original csv
>>> file.
>>>
>>> What did I do wrong here?
>>
>> Maybe Microsoft? We had the problem in South Adfrica, that if the
>> locale was set to South African English, then the csv was ";"
>> seperated - don't tell me why.
>
> Probably MS expects that South Africans, like Germans, use a comma ","
> as the decimal "point", and hence the separator is ";". That's why
> read.csv2() is available - reading that pseudo comma separated format..

Good to know - I should have known that at that time - it caused me 
several headaches.

Rainer
>
> Uwe Ligges
>
>
>>
>> So: check your csv if it is really a csv.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Rainer
>>
>>
>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>>
>> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
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>>
>>
>> - -- 
>> Rainer M. Krug, PhD (Conservation Ecology, SUN), MSc (Conservation
>> Biology, UCT), Dipl. Phys. (Germany)
>>
>> Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology
>> Stellenbosch University
>> South Africa
>>
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