R write dataframe column to csv having leading zeroes

Question

I have a table that stores prefixes of different lengths.. snippet of table(ClusterTable)

ClusterTable[ClusterTable$FeatureIndex == \"Prefix2\",\'Feat

Answer 1

I know this is an old question, but I happened upon a solution for keeping the lead zeroes when opening .csv output in excel. Before writing your .csv in R, add an apostrophe at the front of each value like so:

vector <- sapply(vector, function(x) paste0("'", x))

When you open the output in excel, the apostrophe will tell excel to keep all the characters and not drop lead zeroes. At this point you can format the column as "text" and then do a find and replace to remove the apostrophes (maybe make a macro for this).