R read.table comma inside escaped quotes inside string

Question

I have a .csv file that contains a situation like this (additional spaces added for readability):

1, 3 , "string" ,  "string4"     , NA
2, 5 , "string" , "s\"tring\"4"  , 3
1, 3 , "string" , "stri,ng4"     , 5
8, 7 , "string" , "st\"ri,n\"g4" , 5

I am reading this into RStudio on a Windows 10 machine, using the following statement:

read.table("file_name.csv",fill=TRUE, header=FALSE, quote="\"", sep=",", encoding="UTF-8")

With the following response:

   V1 V2     V3           V4     V5 V6
 1  1  3 string      string4   <NA> NA
 2  2  5 string  s\\tring\\4      3 NA
 3  1  3 string     stri,ng4      5 NA
 4  8  7 string       st\\ri  n\\g4  5

The problem seems to be that the comma within the escaped quotes in row 5, it is being interpreted as a separator.

I am expecting/looking for something like following, but I'm not sure how to get it.

   V1 V2     V3            V4    V5 
 1  1  3 string       string4  <NA>
 2  2  5 string   s\"tring\"4     3
 3  1  3 string      stri,ng4     5
 4  8  7 string  st\"ri,n\"g4     5

I considering reprocessing the file using grep to change \" to ', but I'm curious if there is a more direct method. It seems like a potentially common issue, but I can't find a good example a solution.

Thoughts, anyone?

Found this thread: [link](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32103639/read-csv-file-in-r-with-double-quotes) The suggestion for `fread` from `data.library` did the trick. — better_than_ezra, May 19 '17 at 02:35
Cool! Just for the sake of information, fread is from data.table, not data.library — Fabio Marroni, May 19 '17 at 08:15

score -1 · Answer 1 · answered May 18 '17 at 16:34

-1

Try using read.table("file_name.csv"). It gave me the desired output.

answered May 18 '17 at 16:34

Fabio Marroni

423
8
19

This did not produce the desired results. – better_than_ezra May 19 '17 at 01:49
Strange, it works for me... maybe because I am trying on Unix and not on windows with Rstudio... What results did it produce to you? – Fabio Marroni May 19 '17 at 08:13

R read.table comma inside escaped quotes inside string

1 Answers1