HOW TO IMPORT DATA IN R

R can import data from a variety of sources. It can import data from excel files , comma separated files , tab separated files , special character delimited files, a SQL Server , Oracle Server or any database system that supports ODBC driver.

In this article, I will be demonstrating how to do this from a couple of sources.

Let’s start with the simplest of them all.

Comma Separated Files:

Comma separated files are files where columns in your data are separated by commas. A typical comma separated file would look like this.

Now, we will see how we can import it in R.

R has a built in function to import comma separated files in R. We will use it to import file.

read.csv(file = "E:\Data Analytics\a.txt" , header = TRUE , sep = ",")

Now, I will explain this command in detail.

·         Read.csv is the function used to import file in R.

·         File parameter is used to provide R the file path where file is located.

·         Header is a Boolean parameter used to indicate whether first row of the file is header or data. TRUE indicates that first line is header.

·         Sep tells R what is the separator used to separate the columns in the file.

 When we run this command, we can see the same content that is in the file in R.

 

Well, so far so good. So now we can see our file’s data in R. But just seeing it is not good enough. We need to store it in R so that it can be processed further.

The command to do that is simple. All you need to do is to add a variable where we need to store this file’s data rather than displaying it.

a = read.csv(file = "E:\Data Analytics\a.txt" , header = TRUE , sep = ",")

That’s it. This command will store the contents of the file in an R variable called a. We can see the variable a in R studio’s environment as well. We can see that it also has same number of rows and columns as the file.

 

If we want to see what this variable holds, we can just see it as shown below.

a

 

 

So now we can see the same data from file in a new R variable called a. So now we have imported a comma separated file in R.

| Separated Files:

But sometimes we may get a different file separator than comma. Let’s assume that we got | as separator.

Well, we use the same command, but just change the sep parameter in the command to our new separator.

a = read.csv(file = "E:\Data Analytics\a.txt" , header = TRUE , sep = "|")

As you can see, I have changed the separator to | in sep parameter.

Once we run this, once again all the data from a file separated by | will be stored in variable named a.

So as you can see importing data in R is as easy as it gets.