trouble with exporting a data.frame with " (quotation mark) in some columns into a tab delimited file, then importing the file

Patrick Giraudoux <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lang.r.general
Organization Université de Franche-Comté
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Dear listers, previous plain text was still more messy,

Here a trial hopefully better...

I encountered an issue with a CSV file that was imported correctly but 
could not be re-imported correctly after being written with R. This is 
probably because geographical coordinates were imported  as character in 
degrees, minutes and seconds (DMS), which includes " (quotation mark) 
for the seconds.

Below a reproducible example:

db <- structure(list(lon = c(6.228561, 6.22532, 6.2260499999999999, 
6.2267789999999996, 6.2224659999999998, 6.2209430000000001), latdms = 
c("47°12'28.36\"N", "47°12'33.46\"N", "47°12'28.37\"N", 
"47°12'27.48\"N", "47°12'31.31\"N", "47°12'33.15\"N"), londms = 
c("6°13'42.82\"E", "6°13'31.15\"E", "6°13'33.78\"E", "6°13'36.40\"E", 
"6°13'20.88\"E", "6°13'15.39\"E"), fusutmn = c(32L, 32L, 32L, 32L, 32L, 
32L)), row.names = c(NA, 6L), class = "data.frame")

 > db

write.table(db, file = "db.txt", row.names = FALSE, quote = FALSE, sep = 
"\t")

db_import<-read.delim("db.txt")

 > db_import


As you can see it, latdms and londms are now collapsed and all the 
columns on the right  have shifted to the left. I get the same issue 
with ; as a separator.


I could not find a workaround...

Any hint appreciated,

Patrick
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.