[R] trouble with exporting a data.frame with " (quotation mark) in some columns into a tab delimited file, then importing the file

[Patrick Giraudoux]

Dear listers, previous plain text was still more messy,

Here a trial hopefully better...

I encountered an issue with a CSV file that was imported correctly but 
could not be re-imported correctly after being written with R. This is 
probably because geographical coordinates were imported  as character in 
degrees, minutes and seconds (DMS), which includes " (quotation mark) 
for the seconds.

Below a reproducible example:

db <- structure(list(lon = c(6.228561, 6.22532, 6.2260499999999999, 
6.2267789999999996, 6.2224659999999998, 6.2209430000000001), latdms = 
c("47°12'28.36\"N", "47°12'33.46\"N", "47°12'28.37\"N", 
"47°12'27.48\"N", "47°12'31.31\"N", "47°12'33.15\"N"), londms = 
c("6°13'42.82\"E", "6°13'31.15\"E", "6°13'33.78\"E", "6°13'36.40\"E", 
"6°13'20.88\"E", "6°13'15.39\"E"), fusutmn = c(32L, 32L, 32L, 32L, 32L, 
32L)), row.names = c(NA, 6L), class = "data.frame")

 > db

write.table(db, file = "db.txt", row.names = FALSE, quote = FALSE, sep = 
"\t")

db_import<-read.delim("db.txt")

 > db_import


As you can see it, latdms and londms are now collapsed and all the 
columns on the right  have shifted to the left. I get the same issue 
with ; as a separator.


I could not find a workaround...

Any hint appreciated,

Patrick