CSV value not being read as it appears
Brian, Thanks. My response to David follows. I should add that this problem has never occurred previously as far as I know (I have now checked the previous report I was sent): Hello David, Thanks for your e-mail. The data was a report derived from a statewide database, saved in EXCEL format, so the usual issue of the vagaries of human data entry variation wasn't the issue as the data was an automated report, which is run every three months. I would not have even noticed this problem if I hadn't been double checking the numbers of people by district. Visual inspection didn't reveal this problem - no white space was obvious and the spelling was identical. Tabulation via R wouldn't have detected this - I was obtaining the EXCEL totals via filter which I then compared with R output. I'm hoping I can skip this step, in future, with Jim's suggestion. regards Bob
On Fri, 14 Jan 2011, David Scott wrote:
As a further note, this is a reminder that whenever you get data via
a spreadsheet the first thing to do is examine it and clean up any
problems. A basic requirement is to tabulate any categorical
variable. Spreadsheets allow any sort of data to be entered, with no
controls. My experience is that those who enter data into
spreadsheets enter all sorts of variations of what a human would
wish to treat as the same ("Open", "Open ", "open", etc.), even when
told not to.
Another common problem is that they enter characters such as non-breaking space or zero-width characters: we added support for known encodings of NBSP to strip.white about five years ago.
David Scott On 14/01/2011 4:03 p.m., Jim Holtman wrote:
try strip.white=TRUE to strip out white space Sent from my iPad On Jan 13, 2011, at 21:44, bgreen at dyson.brisnet.org.au wrote:
I have a frustrating issue which I am hoping someone may have a
suggestion
about.
I am running XP and R 2.12.0 and saved an EXCEL file that I was sent
as a
csv file.
The initial code I ran follows.
dec<- read.csv("g://FMH/FO30122010.csv",header=T)
dec.open<- subset (dec, Status == "Open")
table(dec.open$AMHS)
I was checking the output and noticed a difference between my manual
count
and R output. Two subject's rows were not being detected by the subset
command:
For the AMHS where there was a discrepancy I then ran:
wm<- subset (dec, AMHS == "WM")
The problem appears to be that there is a space before the 'Open"
value
for two indivduals, as per the example below.
10/02/2010 Open
22/08/2007 Open
Checking in EXCEL there does not appear to be a space and the format
is
the same (e.g 'general'). I resolved the problem by copying over the
values for the two individuals where I identified a problem.
Given this problem was not detected by visual scanning I would
appreciate
advice on how this problem can be detected in future without my having
to
manually check raw data against R output.
Any assistance is appreciated,
Bob
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______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
--
_________________________________________________________________ David Scott Department of Statistics The University of Auckland, PB 92019 Auckland 1142, NEW ZEALAND Phone: +64 9 923 5055, or +64 9 373 7599 ext 85055 Email: d.scott at auckland.ac.nz, Fax: +64 9 373 7018 Director of Consulting, Department of Statistics ______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
-- Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595