How can I declare a thousand separator in read.csv?

Question

The dataset I want to read in contains numbers with and without a comma as thousand separator:

"Sudan", "15,276,000", "14,098,000", "13,509,000"
"Chad", 209000, 196000, 190000

and I am looking for a way to read this data in.

Any hint appreciated!

Answer 1

Looking at that set of data you could parse it using ", " (note the extra space) as the seperator intead of ","

Answer 2

How about doing it as a two step process. 1. Replace the "," with a TAB character 2. Split on tab.

I'm assuming .NET here but the sample principle would apply in any language

Answer 3

You could use the following regular expression to remove the commas and any surrounding quote marks to leave plain csv content

,(?=[0-9])|"

then process it as normal

Answer 4

since there is an "r" tag under the question, I assume this is an R question. In R, you do not need to do anything to handle the quoted commas:

> read.csv('t.csv', header=F)
     V1          V2          V3          V4
1 Sudan  15,276,000  14,098,000  13,509,000
2  Chad      209000      196000      190000

# if you want to convert them to numbers:
> df <- read.csv('t.csv', header=F, stringsAsFactor=F)
> df$V2 <- as.numeric(gsub(',', '', df$V2))