Add check.names argument to fread

[DavidArenburg]

I didn't find a dupe for this, though it seems like a very needed feature as many times we read files from .CSV that came from .XLS or .XLSX and their column names are not of standard format of R.

I'm well aware that you can do setnames(DT, make.names(names(DT))) but it is very inconvenient IMO.

Thanks

[DavidArenburg]

I don't feel like this was solved as intended. I meant that fread should behave similarly to read.* functions in base R which are using the make.names function instead of the make.unique function (like fread currently doing.

Compare

fread("a b,c d\n 1,2", check.names = TRUE)
#    a b c d
# 1:   1   2
read.csv(text = "a b,c d\n 1,2")
#   a.b c.d
# 1   1   2

I feel like the new check.names argument just adds more to the confusion now rather fixing the issue. I think that this should be reopened.