Hi,
Ah yes, fread is locale aware. So if you Set.locale() for the numeric
option to say the decimal separator is comma, then fread should heed
that. Somewhere, either on S.O. or datatable-help this has come up
before, with example and it was successful. Try searching for
"[data.table] Sys.setlocale" (I forget that function's spelling
exactly).
We could add this locale change as an option to data.table but it
depends on choosing a particular installed locale that has the comma as
separator, and doing this in a cross-platform way is not something I
know a huge amount about. There was a concern that locale changes are
global, but as far as I know it only affects the current R session and
switching back on.exit() should be safe enough (as a way to build it
in). fread uses a stdlib call to read floating point (rather than R
which does it itself in its own C code). It's that stdlib call that is
locale aware and is quite convenient (and fast) from fread's internals
point of view.
Matthew
On 30.04.2013 19:38, ravi wrote:
Hi,
I have a huge excel file that I have converted to a tab delimited
file. The numerical data have a comma as a decimal delimiter. I made
a
compressed version of the file by just taking the first 100 rows. On
this, I have confirmed that the following command works fine :
df<-read.table(file=file1,header=TRUE,sep="\t",dec=",",encoding="latin1")
The following data.table also appears to work OK :
dt<-fread(file1,sep="\t")
But
the numerical data end up as characters. I would like to have help
with
the most efficient method of converting these into numeric class. I
note that sep2 has not been implemented yet. Is there any workaround?
Can I specify the encoding also?
Would appreciate any help that I can get.
Thanks,
Ravi
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