Today, I was importing table that looked like this into R:

with a command:

 r<-read.table("passes_stat",colClasses = c("integer","character"))

Why did I put an extra effort in specifying colClasses? That’s because if I wouldn’t, read.table function would have to make an educated guess about what type of the data my columns contain.

This would not only take longer (see the post here), but in this particular case it would also ruin my leading zeroes – see for example line number 5. Additionally, I might have not even noticed that it happened.

 r<-read.table("passes_stat")
 View(r)