How to avoid: read.table truncates numeric values beginning with 0

Question

I want to import a table (.txt file) in R with read.table(). One column in my table is an ID with nine numerals - some ids begin with a 0, other wi

Answer 1

A reproducible example would be nice, but: use the colClasses argument to read.table() to specify that you want this column to be read as a character variable, not numeric. Or make them back into character variables after reading them in, using sprintf to pad the numbers with leading zeros. (The former is probably easier.)