Although your suggestion to provide the data is excellent and one I typically 
agree with, they data are currently unpublished and so should not be publicly 
available. I have tried to make a reproducible example in the past (when 
similar looking things happened), but was unable to. Maybe I'll try a small 
subset and see if that works.


Kevin


--
Kevin E. Thorpe
Head of Biostatistics,  Applied Health Research Centre (AHRC)
Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael's
Assistant Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health
University of Toronto
email: kevin.tho...@utoronto.ca  Tel: 416.864.5776  Fax: 416.864.3016

________________________________
From: Eric Berger <ericjber...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, July 9, 2018 10:51:38 AM
To: Kevin Thorpe
Cc: R Help Mailing List
Subject: Re: [R] Using write.csv as a connection for read.csv

Hi Kevin,
It's good that you provided the background to the problem.
Rather than asking this list to "debug" your proposed solution, I think you 
would be better off showing some of the "corrupted" data frame and ask for 
suggestions how to deal with it.
(Suggestions may or may not match your initial attempt.)
Can you output a piece of your suspect data frame via the dput() function and 
post to the list?

Best,
Eric


On Mon, Jul 9, 2018 at 5:42 PM, Kevin Thorpe 
<kevin.tho...@utoronto.ca<mailto:kevin.tho...@utoronto.ca>> wrote:
Hi.

I have some data frames I created previously that seem to not be working 
correctly anymore. I *think* the problem is that some of the variables in the 
data frame are of a type called labelled. There are other attributes in the 
data frame as well. I thought that the easiest way to fix this was to convert 
to, say a csv and re-load.

I tried something like read.csv(write.csv(df,row.names=FALSE)) but got the error

  Error in read.table(file = file, header = header, sep = sep, quote = quote,  :
  'file' must be a character string or connection

I guess there must be a way to send the output of write.csv to a connection 
that read.csv can use but I was mystified by the help page on connections, at 
least I could not determine how to achieve my desired result.

I realize I could write to a file and read it back in, but that feels klunky 
somehow. Maybe my approach to convert my data to strip the "weird" stuff is 
wrong-headed and I would accept alternative strategies.

I would like a more general solution to fix this because I expect to encounter 
it some more. For those wondering how I found myself in such a mess, the data 
frames were initially imported from SAS data sets through the haven package. I 
then did some standard manipulation and added some additional labels with the 
upData() function from Hmisc (both packages have been updated since initial 
creation of the data frames).

Thanks,

Kevin

--
 Kevin E. Thorpe
 Head of Biostatistics,  Applied Health Research Centre (AHRC)
 Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael's
 Assistant Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health
 University of Toronto
 email: kevin.tho...@utoronto.ca<mailto:kevin.tho...@utoronto.ca>  Tel: 
416.864.5776  Fax: 416.864.3016


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