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

--

--
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