[R] R 3.1 changes to type.convert causing strings where I used to get numeric

[Bos, Roger]

Dear R-help,

I recently upgraded to R 3.1 patched and code that ran fine previously and now giving a lot of errors because the data is coming in as strings instead of numeric.  I can fix my code to wrapping each item I want to use with as.numeric(), but that seems very inefficient.

I looked at the change list for R 3.1 and I see the first item is a change in type.convert() that seems to be causing me grief.  The suggestion is to use colClasses, but when I try to do so I get an error regarding the quotes again...

>       ann1  <- read.table(driveletter %+% "/snap/ann/snap_fyr_ann1_" %+% i %+% ".txt", header=TRUE, quote="", as.is=TRUE, colClasses='numeric')
Error in scan(file, what, nmax, sep, dec, quote, skip, nlines, na.strings,  :
  scan() expected 'a real', got '"1033.7"'

Does anyone have any suggestions?


CHANGES IN R 3.1.0:
NEW FEATURES


type.convert() (and hence by default read.table()) returns a character vector or factor when representing a numeric input as a double would lose accuracy. Similarly for complex inputs.
If a file contains numeric data with unrepresentable numbers of decimal places that are intended to be read as numeric, specify colClasses in read.table() to be"numeric".


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