I have data with both numeric and character values and the delimiter is a comma. however in some character values, there is comma as well. when I output as CSV file, I don't want to double quotes all my columns, both numeric and character columns, but only those have a comma.
data is like this:
col1 col2 col3 col4 ....
1 1 A A,B ...
2 2 B a,b ...
3 3 c a,b ...
the output I want in CSV file should be like this:
col1 col2 col3 col4 ....
1 1 A "A,B" ...
2 2 B "a,b" ...
3 3 c "a,b" ...
the code for write.csv(data,path, quote=T/F) can control all columns and rows instead of a specific cell.
so does the code write.table(data,path, qmethod="double"/"escape")
I can only quote one column by defined like this:
write.csv(data,path, quote=2)
But I do want to quote only a few cells when they have a comma in it. Does anyone have an idea?
I think you can use write_csv from the readr package:
df <- read.table(header=T, text='col1 col2 col3 col4
1 1 A "AB"
2 2 B "a,b"
3 3 c "a,b"')
readr::write_csv(df, tf <- tempfile(fileext = ".csv"))
file.show(tf)
# col1,col2,col3,col4
# 1,1,A,AB
# 2,2,B,"a,b"
# 3,3,c,"a,b"
From ?readr::write_csv:
Values are only quoted if needed: if they contain a comma, quote or newline.