I realize my command code is not writing a CSV file, I already pointed out that CSV file seems to work OK but not in the TXT format.  Regardless of that, there should be no problems in ArcGIS in reading the date column - in ArcGIS it will simply recognize it as a text field by default.  As I said in my initial posting, when I use other programs to create a text file (say textpad,wordpad, notepad or excel) and bring the txt file into ArcGIS, there is no dropping of the information - it doesn't turn the column into NA's.  It only does this when I try to add text files that were generated from using the write.table or write.csv.

Any thoughts at to explain why I get 2 new columns of data in either the CSV format or the TXT format?
 
~K




________________________________

On 04/03/2013 10:52 AM, Kerry wrote:
> Here's the first 5 lines of my dataset:
> 
> structure(list(id = structure(c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L), .Label = c("F07001",
> "F07002", "F07003", "F07004", "F07005", "F07006", "F07008", "F07009",
> "F07010", "F07011", "F07014", "F07015", "F07017", "F07018", "F07019",
> "F07020", "F07021", "F07022", "F07023", "F07024", "F10001", "F10002",
> "F10004", "F10008", "F10009", "F10010", "F10012", "F10013", "F10014",
> "F98015", "M07007", "M07012", "M07013", "M07016", "M10007", "M10011",
> "M10015"), class = "factor"), x = c(1482445L, 1481274L, 1481279L,
> 1481271L, 1480849L), y = c(6621768L, 6619628L, 6619630L, 6619700L,
> 6620321L), date = structure(c(1173085253, 1173092441, 1173099672,
> 1173106839, 1173114055), class = c("POSIXct", "POSIXt"), tzone = ""),
>     R1dmed = c(2498.29727014221, 657.102921923195, 660.356911071581,
>     620.139702002702, 378.186792471657), R1dmean = c(2498.29727014221,
>     657.102921923195, 660.356911071581, 620.139702002702, 378.186792471657
>     ), R1error = c(FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE), R2error = c(FALSE,
>     FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE)), .Names = c("id", "x", "y",
> "date", "R1dmed", "R1dmean", "R1error", "R2error"), row.names = c(NA,
> 5L), class = "data.frame")
> 
> and here's the code I wrote for this file:
> 
> write.table(test, "D:/MooseEncounters/locations/Individual/test.txt")

That's not a CSV file, it is being written with a blank as separator.   Since it also has blanks in the formatted POSIXct column, you're very likely to run into problems reading it.

Use write.csv(test, "test.csv") and you'll have fewer problems.  If you want tab-delimited columns instead, you'll need to specify that in the write.table call.

Duncan Murdoch
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