title: read.csv row.names
body: <p>I'm trying to read a column oriented csv file into R as a data frame.</p>
  
  <p>the first line of the file is like so:</p>
  
  <p><code>sDATE, sTIME,iGPS_ALT, ...</code></p>
  
  <p>and then each additional line is a measurement:</p>
  
  <p><code>4/10/2011,2:15,78, ...</code></p>
  
  <p>when I try to read this into R, via</p>
  
  <p><code>d = read.csv('filename')</code></p>
  
  <p>I get a duplicate row.names error since R thinks that the first column of the data is the row names, and since all of the measurements were taken on the same day, the values in the first column do not change.</p>
  
  <p>If I put in <code>row.names = NULL</code> into the <code>read.csv</code> call, I get an extraneous column <code>d$row.names</code> which corresponds to the sDATE column, and everything is "shifted" one column down, so <code>d$sDATE</code> would have <code>2:15</code> in it, not <code>4/10/2011</code> as needed.</p>
  
  <p>If I open my csv in excel, do nothing and then save it, everything's cool. I have to process hundreds of these, so manually saving in excel is not something I want. If there's something  programmatically I can do to preprocess these csv's in python or otherwise, that would be great.</p>