Thanks,

Works perfectly, don't know why I couldn't find that command!

James

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 3:56 PM, William Dunlap <wdunlap@tibco.com> wrote:

> Use the colClasses= argument to read.csv().
> E.g.,
>
> > txt <- c("City ZipCode Age", "Newport 02840 0", "Seattle 98105 23")
> > cat(txt, sep="\n")
> City ZipCode Age
> Newport 02840 0
> Seattle 98105 23
> > data <- read.csv(textConnection(txt), header=TRUE,
> colClasses=c("character","character","numeric"),sep=" ")
> > data
>     City ZipCode Age
> 1 Newport   02840   0
> 2 Seattle   98105  23
> > str(data)
> 'data.frame':   2 obs. of  3 variables:
>  $ City   : chr  "Newport" "Seattle"
>  $ ZipCode: chr  "02840" "98105"
>  $ Age    : num  0 23
>
> or
>
> > data <- read.csv(textConnection(txt), header=TRUE,
> colClasses=c("factor","character","numeric"),sep=" ")
> > str(data)
> 'data.frame':   2 obs. of  3 variables:
>  $ City   : Factor w/ 2 levels "Newport","Seattle": 1 2
>  $ ZipCode: chr  "02840" "98105"
>  $ Age    : num  0 23
>
> Bill Dunlap
> Spotfire, TIBCO Software
> wdunlap tibco.com
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: r-help-bounces@r-project.org
> > [mailto:r-help-bounces@r-project.org] On Behalf Of James Splinter
> > Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 2010 12:43 PM
> > To: R-help@r-project.org
> > Subject: [R] Keeping Leading Zeros, Treating numbers as text
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have a data set, with some numerical values, some
> > non-numerical data, my
> > issue is that I need to preserve my ID numbers (numerics)
> > with the leading
> > zeros, but when I import the data into R (it's in .csv
> > format) using the
> > read.csv(" ") command, it turns all the ID numbers (Example:
> > 00210) into
> > numbers, removing the leading zeros, so I end up with 210. I
> > tried using the
> > "as.is=" command on the column that I wanted to treat as
> > text, but it had no
> > effect.
> >
> > Any help would be very much appreciated,
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > James
> >
> >       [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help@r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > PLEASE do read the posting guide
> > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> >
>

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