Dear Help-Rs,
 
I've been dealing with this problem for some time, using a work-around to deal with it. It's time for me to come clean with my ineptitude and seek a what has got to be a more streamlined solution from the Help-Rverse.
 
I regularly import delimited text data that contains numerics enclosed in quotes (e.g., "00765288071").  Thing is, for some of these data, I need to keep the values as "character" class within the data frame (that is to say the leading zeros are important and I would like them to stay).  Here is an example of the code I would use to read an example dataset in question:
 
mydata <- read.csv("~/mydata.csv", quote = "\"'") 
 
The problem is, when R reads the data and converts them into a data frame, inevitably, R ignores the quotes around values like the above, and reads them in as "numeric".  So R strips the valuable leading zeros and converts my "00765288071" to 765288071.  I've developed a work-arounds to this involving the use of the following: 

> whatIneed <- "00000000000"
> whatIgot <- 765288071
> whatIgot <- as.character(whatIgot)
> substr(whatIneed, 1+nchar(whatIneed)-nchar(whatIgot), nchar(whatIneed)) <- whatIgot
> whatIneed
[1] "00765288071"

My question is, am I missing something in how I'm writing my read.csv statement that would indicate to R that numerics enclosed in quotes should be read and imported as characters and not converted to numerics???
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