R: reading in a .csv turns all "" (blank spaces) to NA

Question

I have a data set in which I converted all "~" values to blank spaces "", and when I use the View() function to view the data set, I can clearly see the blank spaces. However, after I save my modified data frame as a .csv file via write.csv and read it again in R via read.csv, all the blank spaces are somehow changed to NA values. I tried to change all my NA values back to the blank spaces again, but the same problem occurs when I save as csv and read it again.

Any help would be appreciated!

would you please post sample data and code that reproduces the problem? the answer probably has to do with your `na.strings` in `read.csv` or your `na` in `write.csv`, or possibly whether the values are characters or factors, but there's no way to know for sure. — C8H10N4O2, Jun 24 '15 at 20:11

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 23 '15 at 15:32

2

there is the parameter na you can specify

write.csv(data, "data.csv", row.names=FALSE, na="")

When you read it again you need to convert NA to blank everytime though

data[is.na(data)]<-""

answered Jun 23 '15 at 15:32

RDGuida

546
4
15

what's weird is in a different column, the blank spaces are appearing perfectly fine – user3755880 Jun 23 '15 at 16:38

R: reading in a .csv turns all "" (blank spaces) to NA

1 Answers1