fread fails with double quotes at the beginning of a field

[daroczig]

The CRAN (1.9.4) version of data.table silently ignores this issue and returns and empty object:

fread('2,3\n""foo,bar')
## Empty data.table (0 rows) of 1 col: "foo,bar

The development version (32975cd) fails with an error:

fread('2,3\n""foo,bar')
## Error in fread("2,3\n\"\"foo,bar") : 
##   Field 1 on line 2 starts with quote (") but then has a problem. It can contain balanced unescaped quoted subregions but if it does it can't contain embedded \n as well. Check for unbalanced unescaped quotes: ""foo,bar

I'm aware of the fact that this "CSV" is not well formed, but that's what I get :( Is there a way to sepcify something like quote=''?

[arunsrinivasan]

Thanks for the report. quote = "" is implemented. Either use that, or wrap your file with "" around character columns so that quote = "\"" can then read it properly. See ?fread quote argument.

[daroczig]

Awesome, thank you very much, @arunsrinivasan & keep up the good work 💯

[arunsrinivasan]

Removed quote argument with a better fix (slightly more robust) for quotes. Please upgrade and test.

[daroczig]

Thanks! For the record, related commit: 9cb1f60