Write.csv while maintaining character data type

[SchylerBrown]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to use write.csv to export a dataframe.
One of the columns in the dataframe are numbers representing unique identifiers for satellite lidar shots. I have used paste0(shot_number) to convert the data type from a number to a character.
Now when I export the data to csv, the columns data type has changed back to a number and is represented in scientific notation. When I use paste0() again, the numbers are no longer unique.

My question is as follows:
How can I export the dataframe as a csv while maintaining the character datatype of the shot number ID?

Any ideas are greatly appreciated.

[FJCC]

When you read the data back in, you can declare the data class to prevent the id being converted to a number.

DF <- data.frame(Code = c("987654321987654321","87654321087654321"), Value = 1:2)
DF
                Code Value
1 987654321987654321     1
2  87654321087654321     2
write.csv(DF, "NumTest.csv", row.names = FALSE)
read.csv("NumTest.csv") #converts to numeric
          Code Value
1 9.876543e+17     1
2 8.765432e+16     2
read.csv("NumTest.csv", colClasses = c("character", "numeric")) #preserves character
                Code Value
1 987654321987654321     1
2  87654321087654321     2
readr::read_csv("NumTest.csv", col_types = "cn") #preserves character with shorthand notation in readr::read_csv
# A tibble: 2 × 2
  Code               Value
  <chr>              <dbl>
1 987654321987654321     1
2 87654321087654321      2

[SchylerBrown]

Thank you FJCC, you've been a huge help.