Change the Blank Cells to "NA"

This should do the trick

dat <- dat %>% mutate_all(na_if,"")

You can use gsub to replace multiple mutations of empty, like "" or a space, to be NA:

data= data.frame(cats=c('', ' ', 'meow'), dogs=c("woof", " ", NA))
apply(data, 2, function(x) gsub("^$|^ $", NA, x))

I'm assuming you are talking about row 5 column "sex." It could be the case that in the data2.csv file, the cell contains a space and hence is not considered empty by R.

Also, I noticed that in row 5 columns "axles" and "door", the original values read from data2.csv are string "NA". You probably want to treat those as na.strings as well. To do this,

dat2 <- read.csv("data2.csv", header=T, na.strings=c("","NA"))

EDIT:

I downloaded your data2.csv. Yes, there is a space in row 5 column "sex". So you want

na.strings=c(""," ","NA")

A more eye-friendly solution using dplyr would be

require(dplyr)

## fake blank cells
iris[1,1]=""

## define a helper function
empty_as_na <- function(x){
    if("factor" %in% class(x)) x <- as.character(x) ## since ifelse wont work with factors
    ifelse(as.character(x)!="", x, NA)
}

## transform all columns
iris %>% mutate_each(funs(empty_as_na)) 

To apply the correction to just a subset of columns you can specify columns of interest using dplyr's column matching syntax. Example:mutate_each(funs(empty_as_na), matches("Width"), Species)

In case you table contains dates you should consider using a more typesafe version of ifelse