r - Preventing column-class inference in fread()

Question

Is there a way for fread to mimic the behaviour of read.table whereby the class of the variable is set by the data that is read in.

I have numeric data with a few comments underneath the main data. When i use fread to read in the data, the columns are converted to character. However, by setting the nrow in read.table` i can stop this behaviour. Is this possible in fread. (I would prefer not to alter the raw data or make an amended copy). Thanks

An example

d <- data.frame(x=c(1:100, NA, NA, "fff"), y=c(1:100, NA,NA,NA)) 
write.csv(d, "test.csv",  row.names=F)

in_d <- read.csv("test.csv", nrow=100, header=T)
in_dt <- data.table::fread("test.csv", nrow=100)

Which produces

> str(in_d)
'data.frame':   100 obs. of  2 variables:
 $ x: int  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
 $ y: int  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
> str(in_dt)
Classes ‘data.table’ and 'data.frame':  100 obs. of  2 variables:
 $ x: chr  "1" "2" "3" "4" ...
 $ y: int  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
 - attr(*, ".internal.selfref")=<externalptr>

As a workaround I thought i would be able to use read.table to read in one line, get the class and set the colClasses, but i am misunderstanding.

cl <- read.csv("test.csv", nrow=1,  header=T)
cols <- unname(sapply(cl, class))
in_dt <- data.table::fread("test.csv", nrow=100, colClasses=cols)
str(in_dt)

Using Windows8.1 R version 3.1.2 (2014-10-31) Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)

Answer 1

Option 1: Using a system command

fread() allows the use of a system command in its first argument. We can use it to remove the quotes in the first column of the file.

indt <- data.table::fread("cat test.csv | tr -d '"'", nrows = 100)
str(indt)
# Classes ‘data.table’ and 'data.frame':    100 obs. of  2 variables:
#  $ x: int  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
#  $ y: int  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
#  - attr(*, ".internal.selfref")=<externalptr> 

The system command cat test.csv | tr -d '"' explained:

• cat test.csv reads the file to standard output
• | is a pipe, using the output of the previous command as input for the next command
• tr -d '"' deletes (-d) all occurrences of double quotes ('"') from the current input

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Option 2: Coercion after reading

Since option 1 doesn't seem to be working on your system, another possibility is to read the file as you did, but convert the x column with type.convert().

library(data.table)
indt2 <- fread("test.csv", nrows = 100)[, x := type.convert(x)]
str(indt2)
# Classes ‘data.table’ and 'data.frame':    100 obs. of  2 variables:
#  $ x: int  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
#  $ y: int  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
#  - attr(*, ".internal.selfref")=<externalptr> 

Side note: I usually prefer to use type.convert() over as.numeric() to avoid the "NAs introduced by coercion" warning triggered in some cases. For example,

x <- c("1", "4", "NA", "6")
as.numeric(x)
# [1]  1  4 NA  6
# Warning message:
# NAs introduced by coercion 
type.convert(x)
# [1]  1  4 NA  6

But of course you can use as.numeric() as well.

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Note: This answer assumes data.table dev v1.9.5