[R] Strange csv parsing problem

[Hadley Wickham]

> url <- "http://dl.dropbox.com/u/41902/22240.csv"
>
> read.csv(url)[, 1]
[1] "oppose"  NA        "oppose"  "support"
> read.csv(url, header = F)[, 1]
[1] "url"
[2] "http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/109-hr-5825/387248"
[3] "http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/110-hr-3546/378743"
[4] "http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/111-s-908/365504"
[5] "http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/111-hr-3245/373358"
>
> count.fields(url, sep = ",")
[1] 11 11 11 12 11

This seems like it should be an error - I suspect it might be caused
by the escaped quote (\") in line 4 column 432 causing the first
column to be treated as column names:

> read.csv(url, row.names = NULL)[, 1]
[1] "http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/109-hr-5825/387248"
[2] "http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/110-hr-3546/378743"
[3] "http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/111-s-908/365504"
[4] "http://maplight.org/us-congress/bill/111-hr-3245/373358"

Hadley

-- 
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
Department of Statistics / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/