Semicolons appeared in CSV file when upload into R

Question

I was instructed by the book Analyzing Financial Data and Implementing Financial Models Using R (Clifford S. Ang 2015, chapter 8) to download the USA real GDP data from IMF website https://www.imf.org/en/home. The downloaded file is a .xls, and I converted it to .csv under the name "USRGDP IMF WEO.csv" as instructed.

Then, when I ran the codes on R, the numeric data in the .csv file reversed itself, with semicolons appeared. Illustration is as below:

1. The original file's number format (when opened by Excel):

   

2. The code:

   library(quantmod)
   us.rgdp <- read.csv("USRGDP IMF WEO.csv", header = FALSE)
   

3. The output:

   

What can be done to fix the data? Thank you, from a beginner to R.

Answer 1

I usually have much more consistent and speedier results using data.table::fread() function. It works for zipped files too.