FIPS codes load as numeric, not character

[dhmontgomery]

When calling data(USA_county_data), the fips column imports as numeric, which obviously causes problem for the 317 counties where the FIPS begins with a 0.

This is easily rectifiable (I ran for (i in 1:nrow(USA_county_data)) {if(nchar(USA_county_data$fips[i]) == 4) {USA_county_data$fips[i] <- paste0("0", USA_county_data$fips[i])}}) but it seems like the data should ideally come in leading-zero-preserving character format to begin with.

[Deleetdk]

Some sources use integers (thus no leading 0's), others use characters (i.e. preserve leading 0's). However, this does not cause any actual ambiguity because there are no pairs like {00123, 123}. One can easily add them back using stringr::str_pad().

I'll take a look when I get back from work.