Having a decimal when passing a file in R

Question

The file is like,

"1" 4 10 "1111111111111111111000000000"
"2" 10 22 "1111111111011111111000000000"
"3" 10 295 "1111111111110000000000000000"
"4" 10 584 "1111010000000000000000000000"
"5" 10 403 "1111111111011100010000000000"
"6" 10 281 "1111010101111011110000000000"
"7" 10 123 "1110000010010010001000000000"
"8" 10 127 "1111111111111111011000000000"
"9" 10 79 "1111011111111110000000000000"
"10" 10 1030 "1111000000010011110000000000"

I firstly read it in R and it is getting stored like,

"V1" "V2" "V3" "V4"
"1" 1 4 10 1.11111111111111e+27
"2" 2 10 22 1.11111111101111e+27
"3" 3 10 295 1.11111111111e+27
"4" 4 10 584 1.11101e+27
"5" 5 10 403 1.1111111110111e+27
"6" 6 10 281 1.11101010111101e+27
"7" 7 10 123 1.11000001001001e+27
"8" 8 10 127 1.11111111111111e+27
"9" 9 10 79 1.11101111111111e+27

Now, when I pass the file to apply the function to the fourth column, it gives the output as in someplaces, eg: 1.111 (i.e., a decimal in the pattern for the string in row 5). Why is this happening?

possible duplicate of [Reading numbers as strings](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15117881/reading-numbers-as-strings) — zx8754, Jul 10 '14 at 15:36

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 10 '14 at 15:34

1

Supposing you're using read.table, the 4th column is interpreted a numeric column, while you presumably want a character column.

To do this, just set the desired column types in the colClasses argument of read.table, e.g. :

DF <- read.table(file=yourFile,
                 colClasses=c('character','integer','integer','character'))

answered Jul 10 '14 at 15:34

digEmAll

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It worked perfectly. Thanks a ton. I was stuck on this since the last two hours. :) – user3797829 Jul 10 '14 at 16:12

Having a decimal when passing a file in R

1 Answers1