read.delim & read.table

Introduction to Importing Data in R

Filip Schouwenaars

Instructor, DataCamp

Tab-delimited file

states.txt

state   capital pop_mill    area_sqm
South Dakota    Pierre  0.853   77116
New York    Albany  19.746  54555
Oregon  Salem  3.970   98381
Vermont Montpelier  0.627   9616
Hawaii  Honolulu    1.420   10931

read.delim("states.txt")

         state    capital pop_mill area_sqm
1 South Dakota     Pierre    0.853    77116
2     New York     Albany   19.746    54555
3       Oregon      Salem    3.970    98381
4      Vermont Montpelier    0.627     9616
5       Hawaii   Honolulu    1.420    10931

Exotic file format

states2.txt

state/capital/pop_mill/area_sqm
South Dakota/Pierre/0.853/77116
New York/Albany/19.746/54555
Oregon/Salem/3.970/98381
Vermont/Montpelier/0.627/9616
Hawaii/Honolulu/1.420/10931

read.table()

Read any tabular file as a data frame
Number of arguments is huge

# Read data with the first row as column headers
read.table("states2.txt", 
             header = TRUE, 
             sep = "/")

         state    capital pop_mill area_sqm
1 South Dakota     Pierre    0.853    77116
2     New York     Albany   19.746    54555
3       Oregon      Salem    3.970    98381
4      Vermont Montpelier    0.627     9616
5       Hawaii   Honolulu    1.420    10931

Let's practice!

Introduction to Importing Data in R