Chapter 6. Reading Data into R
Now that we have seen some of R’s basic functionality, it is time to load in data. As with everything in R, there are numerous ways to get data; the most common is probably reading comma separated values (CSV) files. Of course there are many other options that we will cover as well.
6.1. Reading CSVs
The best way to read data from a CSV file is to use read.table. It might be tempting to use read.csv but that is more trouble than it is worth, and all it does is call read.table with some arguments preset. The result of using read.table is a data.frame.
The first argument to read.table is the full path of the file to be loaded. The file can be sitting on disk or even on the Web. For the purposes of this book we will ...
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