Many programs, particularly Excel, having an annoying habit of dumping crap such as quotes or currency symbols into your csv files. I pointed out earlier a simple way to deal with this in R, but if you’re more comfortable with a *nix, you can use sed to strip quotes out of a file:

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sed "s/\"//g" < [input_file] > [output_file]

While this may be more easily performed with a regular expression in your favorite editor, I’ve found that vi, vim, and textmate choke on large (>1MM line) files.