[R] read.csv and field containing single quotes

[Henrique Dallazuanna]

Benilton,

Try this:

read.table(textConnection(gsub('","', "','", gsub('^\"|\"$', "'",
readLines('../teste.csv')))), sep = ',', quote = "'", header = TRUE)

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:09 PM, Benilton Carvalho
<beniltoncarvalho at gmail.com> wrote:
> I need to read in csv files, created by 3rd party, with fields
> containing single quotes (as shown below).
>
> "header1","header2","header3","header4"
> "field1r1","field2r1","field3r1","field4r1"
> "field1r2","field2r2","field3r2PartA), field3r2PartB Very" Long","field4r2"
> "field1r3","field2r3","field3r3","field4r3"
>
>
> read.csv(filename, quote="\"'", header=TRUE) won't read the file
> represented above, unless the 3rd line has Very""  (double quotes)
> instead of Very" (single quotes)... and this is documented (scan() man
> page).
>
> Assuming that the creation of such csv files is something I'm not in a
> position to interfere with, are there (preferably, "all in R")
> suggestions on how to handle such task?
>
> For the moment, I'm using my poor man's solution (below), but any
> tricks that would simplify this task would be great.
>
> Thank you very much,
>
> benilton
>
>
> parser <- function(fname, header=TRUE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE){
>    txt <- readLines(fname)
>    txt <- gsub("^\"|\"$", "", txt)
>    txt <- strsplit(txt, "\",\"")
>    txt <- do.call(rbind, lapply(txt, function(x) gsub("\"", "\"\"", x)))
>    if (header){
>        nms <- txt[1,]
>        txt <- txt[-1,]
>    }
>    txt <- as.data.frame(txt, stringsAsFactors=stringsAsFactors)
>    if (header) names(txt) <- nms
>    txt
> }
>
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-- 
Henrique Dallazuanna
Curitiba-Paraná-Brasil
25° 25' 40" S 49° 16' 22" O