R read.table and special characters

Wed 16 July 2014

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="350"] read.on.table (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption]

There are some special characters the R function `read.table() <http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/utils/html/read.table.html>`__ (I suppose it is the same for read.csv(), I didn't test) cannot handle. This are mainly quotes (simple or double) and escaped quotes.
The easiest way to handle that is to replace quotes by other characters (in vim, a command to find and replace simple quotes by space is :%s/%x27/ /g as simple quote's ascii code is 0x27)
Another way to deal with it is to pass the appropriate argument quote to the function read.table():

dataset <- read.table("./dataset.txt", quote = "", ...)

The major drawback is that it does not handle escaped quotes.

The best idea is thus to preprocess the files to avoid quotes and escaped quotes.

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