The Book of R

8READING AND WRITING FILES

Now I’ll cover one more fundamental aspect of working with R: loading and saving data in an active workspace by reading and writing files. Typically, to work with a large data set, you’ll need to read in the data from an external file, whether it’s stored as plain text, in a spreadsheet file, or on a website. R provides command line functions you can use to import these data sets, usually as a data frame object. You can also export data frames from R by writing a new file on your computer, plus you can save any plots you create as image files. In this chapter, I’ll go over some useful command-based read and write operations ...