R in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Entering Data Within R

If you are entering a small number of observations, entering the data directly into R might be a good approach. There are a couple of different ways to enter data into R.

Entering Data Using R Commands

Many of the examples in Parts I and II show how to create new objects directly on the R console. If you are entering a small amount of data, this might be a good approach.

As we have seen before, to create a vector, use the c function:

> salary <- c(18700000, 14626720, 14137500, 13980000, 12916666)
> position <- c("QB", "QB", "DE", "QB", "QB")
> team <- c("Colts", "Patriots", "Panthers", "Bengals", "Giants")
> name.last <- c("Manning", "Brady", "Pepper", "Palmer", "Manning")
> name.first <- c("Peyton", "Tom", "Julius", "Carson", "Eli")

It’s often convenient to put these vectors together into a data frame. To create a data frame, use the data.frame function to combine the vectors:

> top.5.salaries <- data.frame(name.last, name.first, team, position, salary)
> top.5.salaries
  name.last name.first     team position   salary
1   Manning     Peyton    Colts       QB 18700000
2     Brady        Tom Patriots       QB 14626720
3    Pepper     Julius Panthers       DE 14137500
4    Palmer     Carson  Bengals       QB 13980000
5   Manning        Eli   Giants       QB 12916666

Using the Edit GUI

Entering data using individual statements can be awkward for more than a handful of observations. (That’s why my example above included only five observations.) Luckily, R provides a nice GUI for editing tabular data: the data editor.

To edit an object with the data editor, ...