R fread and strip white

r csv fread strip removing-whitespace
DaReal picture DaReal · Mar 31, 2014 · Viewed 13.2k times · Source

I have a csv file with extra white spaces that I want to read into R as a dataframe, stripping the white spaces.

This can be achieved by using 

testdata<-read.csv("file.csv", strip.white=TRUE)

The problem is that the dataset large and takes about half an hour. The fread function is at least twice as fast but does not have the strip.white function.

library("data.table")
testdata<-data.frame(fread("file.csv"))

Is there a quick way to strip the white spaces from the columns after reading in, or is there some way to strip the white spaces using fread?

If it was just a one time import, I wouldn't mind that much, but I need to do this several times and regularly.

Answer

Marcin Kosiński picture Marcin Kosiński · Dec 30, 2015

There is a parameter strip.white which is set by default to TRUE in fread right now and you can also pass data.table = FALSE to fread to receive a data.frame after reading the dataset

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