r - Long Numbers As A Character String

Question

As part of my dataset, one of the columns is a series of 24-digit numbers.

Example:

bigonumber <- 429382748394831049284934

When I import it using either data.table::fread or read.csv, it shows up as numeric in exponential format (EG: 4.293827e+23).

options(digits=...) won't work since the number is longer than 22 digits.

When I do

as.character(bigonumber) 

what I get is "4.29382748394831e+23"

Is there a way to get bigonumber converted to a character string and show all of the digits as characters? I don't need to do any math on it, but I do need to search against it and do dplyr joins on it.

I need to this after import, since the column number varies from month to month.

(Yes, in the perfect world, my upstream data provider would use a hash instead of a long number and a static number of columns that stay the same every month, but I don't get to dictate that to them.)

Answer 1

You can specify colClasses on your fread or read.csv statement.

bignums
429382748394831049284934
429382748394831049284935
429382748394831049284936
429382748394831049284937
429382748394831049284938
429382748394831049284939

bignums <- read.csv("~/Desktop/bignums.txt", sep="", colClasses = 'character')