How to read CSV with \", sequence inside quoted character value in R?

Question

Here is a CSV file with two character columns:

"key","value"
"a","\","

All character values are quoted by double quotes. And there is a sequence \", inside one of the values (escaped quote plus delimiter). I cannot correctly read this file neither by read.csv, nor by read_csv from readr, nor by fread from data.table.

Interestingly, if \" and , are separated by space than both read_csv and fread reads the file correctly. But read.csv still fails. The problem is I cannot alter content of the file and must read it as is. — fedyakov

Scarabee Scarabee · Accepted Answer · 2016-10-11T18:30:34

You can use readr's read_delim, which is more general than read_csv:

library(readr)

read_delim('yourfile.csv', 
           delim = ",", 
           escape_double = FALSE, 
           escape_backslash = TRUE)

How to read CSV with \", sequence inside quoted character value in R?

1 Answers