[R] read.table() question

[David Winsemius]

> On Oct 19, 2016, at 1:54 PM, Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> wrote:
> 
>  The file, daily_records.dat, contains these data:
> 
> "station","date","amount"
> "0.3E",2014-01-01,
> "0.3E",2014-01-02,
> "0.3E",2014-01-03,0.01
> "0.3E",2014-01-04,0.00
> "0.3E",2014-01-05,0.00
> "0.3E",2014-01-06,0.00
> "0.3E",2014-01-07,0.10
> "0.3E",2014-01-08,0.22
> "0.3E",2014-01-09,0.49
> 
>  Using read.table("daily_records.dat", header = TRUE, sep = ",", quote =
> "\"\"") the data are assigned to a data.frame named 'rain.'
> 
>  I expect the structure to show station and date as factors with amount as
> numeric, but they're all factors:

I got both station and amounts as numeric:

dat <- read.table(text='"station","date","amount"
"0.3E",2014-01-01,
"0.3E",2014-01-02,
"0.3E",2014-01-03,0.01
"0.3E",2014-01-04,0.00
"0.3E",2014-01-05,0.00
"0.3E",2014-01-06,0.00
"0.3E",2014-01-07,0.10
"0.3E",2014-01-08,0.22
"0.3E",2014-01-09,0.49', header = TRUE, sep = ",",quote =
"\"\"")
str(dat)
'data.frame':	9 obs. of  3 variables:
 $ station: num  0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3 0.3
 $ date   : Factor w/ 9 levels "2014-01-01","2014-01-02",..: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
 $ amount : num  NA NA 0.01 0 0 0 0.1 0.22 0.49


Why aren't you using colClasses?


> 
> str(rain)
> 'data.frame':	341 obs. of  3 variables:
> $ station: Factor w/ 6 levels "0.3E","0.6W",..: 1 1 ...
> $ date   : Factor w/ 62 levels "2013-12-01","2013-12-02",..: 32 33 34 ...
> $ amount : Factor w/ 48 levels "","0.00","0.01",..: 1 1 3 2 ...
> 
>  Why is amount taken as a factor rather than numeric? I do not recall
> having numbers read as factors before this.
> 
>  I expect to need to convert dates using as.Date() but not to convert
> numbers.
> 
> TIA,
> 
> Rich
> 
> ______________________________________________
> 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 http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA