Characters replaced by HTML codes when read from calculated cell

[debarros]

Expected Behavior

Reading the same text from a cell with that text stored as a value and from a cell where the text is the result of a calculation should produce the same value (the text itself).

Actual Behavior

If the text contains &, >, or <, those characters get replaced by &, <, and >, respectively when read from a cell that involves a formula.

Steps to Reproduce the Problem

(please attach an example xlsx file if possible)

1. Read the first two sheets in the attached workbook
   testingCharacters.xlsx

2. Each of the 8 columns (4 in the first sheet and 4 in the second) should contain the exact same values. However, for rows 38, 60, and 62 in the imported data.frame, the value in the first column of the first sheet is different from all of the others.

3. This code shows the issue:

sh1 = read.xlsx(xlsxFile = file.choose(), sheet = 1) # select the attached file
sh2 = read.xlsx(xlsxFile = file.choose(), sheet = 2) # select the attached file
sh3 = cbind.data.frame(sh1, sh2)                     # bind the two dataframes
sh3$Issue = FALSE                                    # create a column to indicate issues
for(i in 1:nrow(sh3)){                               # find the issues
  sh3$Issue[i] = !(all(sh3[i,1:8] == sh3[i,1]))
}
sh3[sh3$Issue,]                                      # display the issues

sessionInfo()

• Version of openxlsx: 4.0.17 and 4.1.0
• Version of R: 3.4.3