Question

Is it possible to write values of different datatypes to a file in R? Currently, I am using a simple vector as follows:

> vect = c (1,2, "string")
> vect
[1] "1"     "2"     "string"
> write.table(vect, file="/home/sampleuser/sample.txt", append= FALSE, sep= "|")

However, since vect is a vector of string now, opening the file has following contents being in quoted form as:

"x"
"1"|"1"
"2"|"2"
"3"|"string"

Is it not possible to restore the data types of entries 1 and 2 being treated as numeric value instead of string. So my expected result is:

"x"
"1"|1
"2"|2
"3"|"string"

also, I am assuming the left side values “1”, “2” and “3” are vector indexes? I did not understand how the first line is “x”?

Answer 1

I wonder if simply removing all the quotes from the output file will solve your problem? That’s easy: Add quote=FALSE to your write.table() call.

write.table(vect, file="/home/sampleuser/sample.txt", 
            append=FALSE, sep="|", quote=FALSE)

x
1|1
2|2
3|string

Also, you can get rid of the column and row names if you like. But now your separator character doesn’t appear because you have a one-column table.

write.table(vect, file="/home/sampleuser/sample.txt", append=FALSE, sep="|",
            quote=FALSE, row.names=FALSE, col.names=FALSE)

1
2
string