styler packagescale()The first operation we typically must perform when analyzing data is reading our data from a file into R. The readr package in the default tidyverse packages contains the following similar functions that import data from delimited text files:
| Function | Brief description/use |
|---|---|
read_csv |
Delimiter: , - Decimal separator: . |
read_csv2 |
Delimiter: ; - Decimal separator: , |
read_tsv |
Delimiter: <tab> - Decimal separator: . |
read_delim |
Delimiter: set by user - Decimal separator: . |
Some CSV files can be very large and may be
compressed to save
space. There are many different file compression algorithms, but the most common
in data science and biology are gzip and
bzip. All the readr file reading functions can work
with compressed files directly, so you do not need to decompress them first.
Each of these functions returns a special data frame called a
tibble, which is explained in the next section.
Note that readr also has functions for writing delimited
files. These functions
behave similarly to the read_X functions but instead of creating a tibble from
a file, they create a file from a tibble. You will frequently need to export the
results of your analysis to share with collaborators and also as part of larger
workflows that use tools other than R.