[R] read.table and NaN

[Bert Gunter]

Not so. Read ?read.table carefully. You can use "NA" as a default.
Moreover, you **specified** that you want NaN read as character, which
means that any column containing NaN **must** be character. That's part of
the specification for data frames (all columns must be one data type). So
either change your specfication or change your data structure.

And, incidentally, my first name is "Bert" .

Cheers,
Bert

Bert Gunter

"The trouble with having an open mind is that people keep coming along and
sticking things into it."
-- Opus (aka Berkeley Breathed in his "Bloom County" comic strip )


On Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 6:43 AM Sebastien Bihorel <
Sebastien.Bihorel using cognigencorp.com> wrote:

> Thanks Gunter
>
> It seems that one has to know the structure of the data and adapt the
> read.table call accordingly. I am working on a framework that is meant to
> process data files with unknown structure, so I have to think a bit more
> about that...
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Bert Gunter <bgunter.4567 using gmail.com>
> *Sent:* Thursday, October 24, 2019 00:08
> *To:* Sebastien Bihorel <Sebastien.Bihorel using cognigencorp.com>
> *Cc:* r-help using r-project.org <r-help using r-project.org>
> *Subject:* Re: [R] read.table and NaN
>
> Like this?
>
> con <- textConnection(object = 'A,B\n1,NaN\nNA,2')
> > tmp <- read.table(con, header = TRUE, sep = ',', na.strings = '',
> stringsAsFactors = FALSE,
> +                   colClasses = c("numeric", "character"))
> > close.connection(con)
> > tmp
>    A   B
> 1  1 NaN
> 2 NA   2
> > class(tmp[,1])
> [1] "numeric"
> > class(tmp[,2])
> [1] "character"
> > tmp[,2]
> [1] "NaN" "2"
>
>
> Bert Gunter
>
> "The trouble with having an open mind is that people keep coming along and
> sticking things into it."
> -- Opus (aka Berkeley Breathed in his "Bloom County" comic strip )
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 6:31 PM Sebastien Bihorel via R-help <
> r-help using r-project.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Is there a way to make read.table consider NaN as a string of characters
> rather than the internal NaN? Changing the na.strings argument does not
> seems to have any effect on how R interprets the NaN string (while is does
> not the the NA string)
>
> con <- textConnection(object = 'A,B\n1,NaN\nNA,2')
> tmp <- read.table(con, header = TRUE, sep = ',', na.strings = '',
> stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
> close.connection(con)
> tmp
> class(tmp[,1])
> class(tmp[,2])
>
>
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