R importing and exporting csv files (Excel) - r

This might be a noob question but I have a problem with exporting and importing a CSV.
I export a CSV with values (i.e. 300425.25). When I open this in Excel it is all comma delimited, as expected. When I hit Data To Columns I everytime changes my values to 300425,25 (I have tried all different combinations of decimal seperator in Advanced). This is excellent to work with in Excel but import this back into R I'm stuck with comma before the decimals, which in turn is unusable with the rest of my R code.
I never had this problem with the export of .CSV until I recently cleaned my computer and had a fresh install. I suspect it might be in R studio settings or Excel.
Can somebody help me out?
Thanks in advance.

Related

Writing .xlsx in R, importing into PowerBi error

I'm experiencing an odd error. I have a large dataframe in R (75000 rows, 97 columns) and I need to save it out and then import it into Power Bi.
At first I just did the simple:
library(tidyverse)
write_csv(Visits,"Visits.csv")
and while it seems to export and looks fine in excel, the csv itself is all messed up when I look at the contents in Power Bi. Here's an example of what I mean:
The 'phase.x' column should only have "follow-up" or "treatment" in that column. In excel, looks great:
but that exact same file gets screwed up in Power Bi:
I figured that being a 'comma separated variable' file, there must be some extra comma somewhere, and I saved it as an .xlsx instead.
So, while in excel, I saved that .csv as an .xlsx and it opened great in Power Bi!
Jump forward a moment and instead of write_csv() in R, I use write.xlsx(). But now I get this error:
If I simply go to that file, open it in excel, save it and hit close, that error goes away and it can load into Power Bi just fine. I figure it has something to do with this question on here.
Any ideas on what I might be screwing up as I save it out of R? Somehow I can fix it in R and not have to open and save it every time?
In power BI check that your source has ignore quoted line breaks enabled. I've found this is often an issue with .csv files in PowerBI.

R misreading csv files after modifications on Excel

This is more of a curiosity.
Sometimes I modify csv files from Excel rather than R (suppose I manage to find a missing piece of info and I type it in the csv file), of course maintaining commas and quotes as they were.
Every time I do this, R becomes unable to read the csv file, i.e. it imports a single column as it appears on Excel, rather than separating the values (no options like sep= or quote= change this).
Does anyone know why this happens?
Thanks a lot
An example
This was readable:
state,"city","county"
AK,"Anchorage",""
AK,"Haines",""
AK,"Juneau","Juneau"
After adding the missing info under "county", R fails to import it as a data frame, reading it instead as a single vector.
state,"city","county"
AK,"Anchorage","Anchorage"
AK,"Haines","Haines"
AK,"Juneau","Juneau"
Edit:
I'm just running the basic read.csv
df <- read.csv("C:/directory/df.csv")

Exporting csv using excel into R

I hope someone can help me solve the problem I am currently facing with excel. I have been trying to export a csv file I wrote in Excel Ver 16 into R studio but it keeps giving the "incomplete final line found by readTableHeader on 'Book1.csv'" error. I have included the screen shot of the error and the files I had used for this. This doesnt seem to happen for the other data set I downloaded directly from Kaggle called "adult-test.csv" though.
I have tried everything from reinstalling R, R studio, Excel, I even resorted to using Google Sheets and it still doesn't work. If anyone knows what I am doing wrong please do help!
Image of my R studio code
Picture of the csv file I am failing to read
Hard to guess here.
Sometimes Excel saves csv files incorrectly - even though cells below your table are empty Excel saves them in the csv because maybe in the past, there was something written in there.
So, here is a suggestion
Maybe try to read the Excel file directly, not save it first as a csv. You can do that for example with read.xlsx() from the openxlsx package.
If that does not help, please open the csv file with a text editor (not with Excel again). You will then be able to see the actual problem and if necessary, post the text here (instead of the Excel screenshot)

Why does Excel make un-expanded dates unreadable to other software?

I recently ran into an issue in R where it wasn't reading the date values from my csv file. I had reviewed and revised my code many times before realizing the source of the issue was the file itself. After experimentation, I realized that the date would only read if I expanded the date column in Excel and then resaved the file. This doesn't seem logical to me, the data is stored in the spreadsheet so while I expect Excel to make it unreadable to the human eye until the column is expanded, I did not expect it to be unreadable to another computer program, in this case, R. I feel that I got lucky discovering this and would like to understand why it works that way?
It helps to mention that I noticed a very similar issue when pasting un-expanded dates from Excel to Google Sheets; the result is cells filled with "######" instead of the actual date values.
Because Excel is the common party here I'm assuming this is an Excel issue.
What is happening with Excel to make the un-expanded date values unreadable to other software? Is this something that Excel is aware of?
Un-expanded dates
R-Misread
Google Sheets Paste
After expanding the column in the csv file and saving it, both the R issue and the Google Sheets issue went away.

R Copying to and Reading from csv Files

When I go to save Excel data that I've pasted into a .csv file, I get a formatting issue and often the saved file has all the numbers in each row as one long string.
My read statement is
resids<-read.csv("C:\\Projects\residuals_Parts3.csv",header=TRUE)
Any ideas on how to fix this?
The warning you are getting is fairly standard in Excel - any formatting you've added to the file (e.g. widening columns) will get lost if you don't save the file as an excel file.. and the warning is supposed to remind you of this. Personally, the extra click or two annoys me too.
If you would like to avoid converting excel files to CSV before bringing them into R, try the openxls package. It's saved me from a lot of that monkey business.

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