"Preprocess" in R:
lines <- "www, rrr, 1,234, ttt \n rrr,zzz, 1,234,567,987, rrr"
Can use readLines
on a textConnection
. Then remove only the commas that are between digits:
gsub("([0-9]+)\\,([0-9])", "\\1\\2", lines)
## [1] "www, rrr, 1234, ttt \n rrr,zzz, 1234567987, rrr"
It's als useful to know but not directly relevant to this question that commas as decimal separators can be handled by read.csv2 (automagically) or read.table(with setting of the 'dec'-parameter).
Edit: Later I discovered how to use colClasses by designing a new class. See: