[Request] Strip commas from columns declared numeric in fread

[SteveBronder]

A common problem when moving data from excel to R is that excel leaves commas in numbers if the user is not careful. Would it be possible to, as the data is being read through in fread, if the past X rows were numeric and the newest row has a comma, strip the comma and continue with the column being numeric?

I was thinking something similar to this stackoverflow answer

setAs("character", "num.with.commas", 
        function(from) as.numeric(gsub(",", "", from) ) )

The user could have an option commaNumeric = TRUE such that when true fread will rip commas out of columns it has already declared numeric after the first 30 rows or so.

P.S. thanks for the package, it's really wonderful!

[arunsrinivasan]

Thanks. Many fread enhancements are planned for next release.

[jaapwalhout]

Would be nice, but could this interfere with European style decimal separator (which is a comma)?

[MichaelChirico]

@jaapwalhout something to keep an eye out for, but I think interacting this with the already-implemented dec argument should be sufficient.

[jangorecki]

this seems to be duplicate of #1636