Message-ID: <39F3A82E-2506-44F6-AC12-62E324EB561E@dcn.davis.ca.us>
Date: 2025-09-14T20:18:22Z
From: Jeff Newmiller
Subject: trouble with exporting a data.frame with " (quotation mark) in some columns into a tab delimited file, then importing the file
In-Reply-To: <6a5eee24-b5d7-4ff8-88c0-82a842c08e2b@univ-fcomte.fr>
Yeah, _that_ will be educational. read.csv is quite brief... but you may want to read [1] first.
[1] https://adv-r.hadley.nz/
On September 14, 2025 12:28:12 PM PDT, Patrick Giraudoux <patrick.giraudoux at univ-fcomte.fr> wrote:
>Fantastic Bert ! It works perfect. Now I will dig in a bit to understand
>how write.csv works...
>
>Thank you,
>
>Patrick
>
>Le 14/09/2025 ? 20:05, Bert Gunter a ?crit?:
>> See ?write.table documentation for "qmethod", which needs to be set
>> to "double" to write the data correctly for csv. This is most easily
>> done by using read.csv and write.csv, for which this is the default.
>> Ergo, the following :
>>
>> (using your example)
>>
>>> write.csv(db, file = "test", row.names = FALSE)
>> ## Note: Set row.names = FALSE so an extra column of numeric row names
>> won't be added.
>>> db2 <- read.csv("test") ## read it back in
>>> identical(db2, db)
>> [1] TRUE
>>
>> Apologies if I have misunderstood and this does not solve your problem.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Bert
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Sep 14, 2025 at 10:46?AM Patrick Giraudoux
>> <patrick.giraudoux at univ-fcomte.fr> wrote:
>>> 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
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>> PLEASE do read the posting guidehttps://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
>______________________________________________
>R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
>https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>PLEASE do read the posting guide https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
--
Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.