Jennifer (Jenny) Bryan

Oh I see you say that you are expecting the empty string. That strikes me as un-R-like. If we have an element of a character vector whose value is unknown,...

To make an analogy to other types of vectors in R, we wouldn't fill in a 0 for an unknown numeric value or `FALSE` for an unknown logical value or...

> if I understand correctly readxl always treats blank cells as missing data, and that is the intended behaviour Yes, I think that is a fair statement.

I also don't consider `""` and `NA` to be equivalent.

Cell A3 (with the apostrophe to explicitly indicate the value is the empty string) seems distinct from A4, as @nacnudus's XML suggests. The argument why A3 should import as `""`...

``` xml 1 2 5 ``` To be more concrete, here's the XML for rows 3 and 4 for @nacnudus's example. The cell A3 has type "s", which means contents...

This is actually tricky to solve. The string you see @kbroman, `2015-07-27`, is not available in the Excel file itself. The file holds the integer 42212 and a reference to...

A proper solution, which is not imminent, would exploit something like this: https://github.com/WizardMac/TimeFormatStrings

https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs/blob/master/packages/ssf/README.md > ssf (SpreadSheet Format) is a pure JS library to format data using ECMA-376 spreadsheet format codes (used in popular spreadsheet software packages).

https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs/blob/b738e5d3f15f42dad1bcd96c6d9765123cd82b80/packages/ssf/bits/81_fmttype.js