thanks @nirgrahamuk; I just went to the original data and eliminated the spaces before the values in the column manually. However, for future reference, does trimws() function do this? Strange that using the trimws() function did not seem to work and replaced the values that had whitespace before them in the column with NAs.
It might be helpful to know how to do this with a bigger dataset in the future (where manual troubleshooting would be inefficient).
if the text of the numbers has simple whitespace as achieved by hitting space bar, trimws() would trim the leading and trailing spaces but this is also superflous as the primitive casting to numeric/double would do the same anyways.
Because data.sources can come from all manner of systems, if your data source is standard and comforms to common ways of doing things, then common approaches will tend to work.
But all kings of monsters lurk in encodings etc, and its quite possible as seens to need to explicity convert encodings and such treatments to make things work; as I think my above example explicitly demonstrates.
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