Specifying colClasses in the read.csv

Question

I am trying to specify the colClasses options in the read.csv function in R. In my data, the first column \"time\" is basically a character vector

Answer 1

If you want to refer to names from the header rather than column numbers, you can use something like this:

fname <- "test.csv"
headset <- read.csv(fname, header = TRUE, nrows = 10)
classes <- sapply(headset, class)
classes[names(classes) %in% c("time")] <- "character"
dataset <- read.csv(fname, header = TRUE, colClasses = classes)