Is there a way to read columns with strings as strings when using RGoogleDocs

Question

I use RGoogleDocs a lot. I use it to read in data that is private or only shared with a few people. I know that read.table and read.csv allow one to use stringsAsFactors=FALSE.

I want to do something similar in RGoogleDocs. Here is my typical code

sheets.con <- getGoogleDocsConnection(getGoogleAuth("fjb@gmail.com", ps, service ="wise"))
spreadsheet <- getWorksheets("private spreadsheet",sheets.con)
first <- sheetAsMatrix(spreadsheet$"Sheet 1",header=TRUE, as.data.frame=TRUE, trim=TRUE) #Get one sheet

That almost always reads the character values as factors. I have been using data.table a lot lately and factors seem to make my data munging in data.table a bit bothersome. Is there an easy way to read the non-numeric columns as character vectors rather than as factors?

Answer 1

Duncan Temple Lang, the writer of RGoogleDocs updated the package to 0.7-0. He added stringsAsFactors to the getWorksheets() and sheetAsMatrix() function.

Here is how you can get it into your R.

   install.packages("devtools")
   library(devtools)
   install_github("RGoogleDocs", "duncantl")

Now my line is

   first <- sheetAsMatrix(spreadsheet$"Sheet 1",header=TRUE, as.data.frame=TRUE, trim=TRUE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE) #Get one sheet