R: Data Analysis and Visualization

Loading data into R

Thus far, we've only been entering data directly into the interactive R console. For any data set of non-trivial size this is, obviously, an intractable solution. Fortunately for us, R has a robust suite of functions for reading data directly from external files.

Go ahead, and create a file on your hard disk called favorites.txt that looks like this:

flavor,number
pistachio,6
mint chocolate chip,7
vanilla,5
chocolate,10
strawberry,2
neopolitan,4

This data represents the number of students in a class that prefer a particular flavor of soy ice cream. We can read the file into a variable called favs as follows:

  > favs <- read.table("favorites.txt", sep=",", header=TRUE)

If you get an error that there is no such file or directory, ...