title: read.csv falsely converts string to integer
body: <p>This is a follow-up on the question: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42997786/read-csv-falsly-converts-string-to-integer">read.csv falsly converts string to integer</a></p>
  <p>I have a CSV file (toy example):</p>
  <pre><code>V1,V2,V3
  1,00010,a
  2,10010,v
  </code></pre>
  <p>I want to read the second column as a string value.</p>
  <p>I am aware of the colClasses method in the <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42997786/read-csv-falsly-converts-string-to-integer">read.csv falsly converts string to integer</a> question.</p>
  <p>However, my data files contain 5,000+ columns with mixed variable types, while only one column is problematic. I can do something like this:</p>
  <pre><code>df &lt;- read.csv(&quot;data.csv&quot;); temp &lt;- sapply(df,class); temp[2] &lt;- &quot;character&quot;; df &lt;- read.csv(&quot;data.csv&quot;,colClasses=temp)
  </code></pre>
  <p>But this is so ugly way of coding. Is there any more diligent way of doing this?</p>