read.table() with quoted integers

On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 8:10 AM, Joris Meys <jorismeys at gmail.com> wrote:

Regardless of whether "stored as character" is interpreted the R way or the
ASCII way, the point Joshua makes is rather valid. Mainly because
read.table has an argument quote with default value \"'. This means that at
least according to R, everything between either " or ' should be seen as of
type character and not integer.

The only way these quotes can end up in a .csv file, is when in the
rendering program (often Excel), these integers are called "character"
inside the program as well. So they're not treated as integers by the
person that created the file, so R won't treat them
as integers either. Note that read.table does read the quoted integers as
characters, and only afterwards convert those.

So yes, this is an issue with read.table.ffdf more than with R itself. And
the problem is indeed how integers are treated *the moment they are stored*.
This refering to the presence/absence of the quote character.

This assumes too much about the program that creates the file.

Quoted numeric values may be necessary in non-American locales which use the comma as decimal separator. (CSV files written in these locales often use something other than the comma for the field separator, but this is not required.)