Importing csv file into R - numeric values read as characters

Question

I am aware that there are similar questions on this site, however, none of them seem to answer my question sufficiently.

This is what I have done so far:

I

Answer 1

version for data.table based on code from dmanuge :

convNumValues<-function(ds){
  ds<-data.table(ds)
  dsnum<-data.table(data.matrix(ds))
  num_cols <- sapply(dsnum,function(x){mean(as.numeric(is.na(x)))<0.5})
  nds <- data.table(  dsnum[, .SD, .SDcols=attributes(num_cols)$names[which(num_cols)]]
                        ,ds[, .SD, .SDcols=attributes(num_cols)$names[which(!num_cols)]] )
return(nds)
}