en:data_import_r
Data types and import into R
R functions
read.table
- reads table in a plain text with cells delimited by some symbol (default setting for delimiter issep = “”
, i.e. one or more white spaces, tabs, newlines or returns).read.delim
- reads table delimited by tabulators.read.csv
- reads table delimited by commas (,), with decimals being dots (.).read.csv2
- reads table delimited by semicolons (;) and decimals being commas (,).read_excel
(libraryreadxl
) - reads data frames directly from Excel file (both *.xls and *.xlsx) without need to install any third party software; it stores data intibble
format, with rownames (if any) as the first column of the data - this needs to be treated before further analysis (see Example section to see how).read.cep
(libraryvegan
) - reads legacy canoco condensed files (usually with extension*.cep
or*.cc!
); the function can get quite slow for large datasets - if the speed is an issue, consider usingreadCEP
fromcepreader
package (also maintained by Jari Oksanen)read.CEP
(libraryrioja
) the same asread.cep
fromvegan
andreadCEP
fromcepreader
; the packagerioja
has also functionwrite.CEP
producing cep files.
Note that by default, functions like read.table
, read.delim
, read.csv
and read.csv2
import the columns containing characters strings into R as factors. If you don't like this behaviour, change the setting of stringsAsFactors
argument into FALSE
. If you want to know why this behaviour is set to default, read this blog post.
en/data_import_r.txt · Last modified: 2021/03/03 19:47 by David Zelený