How to read data when some numbers contain commas as thousand separator?

Question

I have a csv file where some of the numerical values are expressed as strings with commas as thousand separator, e.g. \"1,513\" instead of 1513. Wh

Answer 1

You can have read.table or read.csv do this conversion for you semi-automatically. First create a new class definition, then create a conversion function and set it as an "as" method using the setAs function like so:

setClass("num.with.commas")
setAs("character", "num.with.commas", 
        function(from) as.numeric(gsub(",", "", from) ) )

Then run read.csv like:

DF <- read.csv('your.file.here', 
   colClasses=c('num.with.commas','factor','character','numeric','num.with.commas'))