Reading correctly alphanumeric fields into R
- by gd047
A tab-delimited text file, which is actually an export (using bcp) of a database table, is of that form:
102 1 01 e113c 3224.96 12
102 1 01 e185 101127.25 12
102 2 01 e185 176417.90 12
102A 3 01 e185 26261.03 12
I tried to import it in R with a command like
data <- read.delim("C:\\test.txt", header = FALSE, sep = "\t")
The problem is that the 3rd column which is actually a varchar field (alphanumeric) is mistakenly read as integer (as there are no letters in the entire column) and the leading zeros disappeared. The same thing happened when I imported the data directly from the database, using odbcConnect. Again that column was read as integer.
str(data)
$ code: int 1 1 1 1 1 1 6 1 1 8 ...
How can I import such a dataset in R correctly, so as to be able to safely populate that db table again, after doing some data manipulations?
