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I realize setting skipNul = TRUE in read.csv() and read.table() skips over/ignores "embedded nulls" (see ?read.csv and Get "embedded nul(s) found in input" when reading a csv using read.csv()).

What does skipping/ignoring embedded nulls mean for the resulting data in R? I expect R's "skipping" or "ignoring" them means they're kept as text strings, when they would ideally show up as NA values, except the na.strings argument wasn't sufficient to catch them.

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Daniel Fletcher
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1 Answers1

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This is very late but as someone who ran into R's character encoding hell and found documentation sorely lacking: Embedded nuls aren't NAs, they're invisible characters embedded in strings. You don't lose anything from the data by getting rid of them.

D3SL
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