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POImporting CSV data containing commas, thousand separators and trailing minus sign
 

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  1. POImporting CSV data containing commas, thousand separators and trailing minus sign
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    <p>R 2.13.1 on Mac OS X. I'm trying to import a data file that has a point for thousand separator and comma as the decimal point, as well as trailing minus for negative values.</p> <p>Basically, I'm trying to convert from:</p> <pre><code>"A|324,80|1.324,80|35,80-" </code></pre> <p>to</p> <pre><code> V1 V2 V3 V4 1 A 324.80 1324.8 -35.80 </code></pre> <p>Now, interactively both the following works:</p> <pre><code>gsub("\\.","","1.324,80") [1] "1324,80" gsub("(.+)-$","-\\1", "35,80-") [1] "-35,80" </code></pre> <p>and also combining them:</p> <pre><code>gsub("\\.", "", gsub("(.+)-$","-\\1","1.324,80-")) [1] "-1324,80" </code></pre> <p>However, I'm not able to remove the thousand separator from read.data:</p> <pre><code>setClass("num.with.commas") setAs("character", "num.with.commas", function(from) as.numeric(gsub("\\.", "", sub("(.+)-$","-\\1",from))) ) mydata &lt;- "A|324,80|1.324,80|35,80-" mytable &lt;- read.table(textConnection(mydata), header=FALSE, quote="", comment.char="", sep="|", dec=",", skip=0, fill=FALSE,strip.white=TRUE, colClasses=c("character","num.with.commas", "num.with.commas", "num.with.commas")) Warning messages: 1: In asMethod(object) : NAs introduced by coercion 2: In asMethod(object) : NAs introduced by coercion 3: In asMethod(object) : NAs introduced by coercion mytable V1 V2 V3 V4 1 A NA NA NA </code></pre> <p>Note that if I change from "\\." to "," in the function, things look a bit different:</p> <pre><code>setAs("character", "num.with.commas", function(from) as.numeric(gsub(",", "", sub("(.+)-$","-\\1",from))) ) mytable &lt;- read.table(textConnection(mydata), header=FALSE, quote="", comment.char="", sep="|", dec=",", skip=0, fill=FALSE,strip.white=TRUE, colClasses=c("character","num.with.commas", "num.with.commas", "num.with.commas")) mytable V1 V2 V3 V4 1 A 32480 1.3248 -3580 </code></pre> <p>I think the problem is that read.data with dec="," converts the incoming "," to "." BEFORE calling as(from, "num.with.commas"), so that the input string can be e.g. "1.324.80".</p> <p>I want as("1.123,80-","num.with.commas") to return -1123.80 and as("1.100.123,80", "num.with.commas") to return 1100123.80.</p> <p>How can I make my num.with.commas replace all <strong>except the last</strong> decimal point in the input string?</p> <p><strong>Update</strong>: First, I added negative lookahead and got as() working in the console:</p> <pre><code>setAs("character", "num.with.commas", function(from) as.numeric(gsub("(?!\\.\\d\\d$)\\.", "", gsub("(.+)-$","-\\1",from), perl=TRUE)) ) as("1.210.123.80-","num.with.commas") [1] -1210124 as("10.123.80-","num.with.commas") [1] -10123.8 as("10.123.80","num.with.commas") [1] 10123.8 </code></pre> <p>However, read.table still had the same problem. Adding some print()s to my function showed that num.with.commas in fact got the comma and not the point.</p> <p>So my current solution is to then replace from "," to "." in num.with.commas.</p> <pre><code>setAs("character", "num.with.commas", function(from) as.numeric(gsub(",","\\.",gsub("(?!\\.\\d\\d$)\\.", "", gsub("(.+)-$","-\\1",from), perl=TRUE))) ) mytable &lt;- read.table(textConnection(mydata), header=FALSE, quote="", comment.char="", sep="|", dec=",", skip=0, fill=FALSE,strip.white=TRUE, colClasses=c("character","num.with.commas", "num.with.commas", "num.with.commas")) mytable V1 V2 V3 V4 1 A 324.8 1101325 -35.8 </code></pre>
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