Read cell values without formatting into R with googlesheets - r

Question

Would like to be able to read Google Sheets cell values into R with googlesheets package, but without any cell formatting applied (e.g. comma separators, percentage conversion, etc.).
Have tried gs_read() without specifying a range, which uses gs_read_csv(), which will "request the data from the Sheets API via the exportcsv link". Can't find a way to tell it to provide underlying cell value without formatting applied.
Similarly, tried gs_read() and specifying a range, which uses gs_read_cellfeed(). But can't find a way to indicate that I want un-formatted cell values.
Note: I'm not after the formulas in any cells, just the values without any formatting applied.
Example:
(looks like I'm not able to post image images)
Here's a screenshot of an example Google Sheet:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qff05u8nn3do33n/Screenshot%202015-07-26%2008.42.58.png?dl=0
First and third columns are numeric with no formatting applied, 2nd column applies comma separators for thousands, 4th column applies percentage formatting.
Reading this sheet with the following code:
library(googlesheets)
gs <- gs_title("GoogleSheets Test")
ws <- gs_read(gs, ws = "Sheet1")
yields:
> str(ws)
Classes ‘tbl_df’, ‘tbl’ and 'data.frame': 3 obs. of 4 variables:
$ Number : int 123456 123457 123458
$ Number_wFormat : chr "123,456" "123,457" "123,458"
$ Percent : num 0.123 0.234 0.346
$ Percent_wFormat: chr "12.34%" "23.45%" "34.56%"
Would like to be able to read a worksheet that has formatting applied (ala columns 2 and 4), but read the unformatted values (ala columns 1 and 3).

Answer 1

At this point, I think your best bet is to fix the imported data like so:
> ws$Number_fixed <- type.convert(gsub(',', '', ws$Number_wFormat))
> ws$Percent_fixed <- type.convert(gsub('%', '', ws$Percent_wFormat)) / 100
> str(ws)
Classes ‘tbl_df’, ‘tbl’ and 'data.frame': 3 obs. of 6 variables:
$ Number : int 123456 123457 123458
$ Number_wFormat : chr "123,456" "123,457" "123,458"
$ Percent : num 0.123 0.234 0.346
$ Percent_wFormat: chr "12.34%" "23.45%" "34.56%"
$ Number_fixed : int 123456 123457 123458
$ Percent_fixed : num 0.123 0.234 0.346
I had some hope that post-processing with functions from readr would be a decent answer, but it looks like percentages and "currency" style numbers are open issues there too.
I have opened an issue to solve this better in googlesheets, one way or another.