[R] How to Import Data

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 2/21/2006 9:13 AM, Adaikalavan Ramasamy wrote:
> 1) You need to use sep="," which is appropriate for a CSV file.
> 
> 2) You need to specify the FULL path to the file. See 
> http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rw-FAQ.html#R-can_0027t-find-my-file

The advice to look at the FAQ is good, but it's not true that you need 
the full path.  Like other programs, R maintains a current working 
directory, and paths can be specified relative to that.  I usually put a 
line like

setwd('c:/my/working/dir')

at the start of scripts, so that the current directory is changed from 
the beginning.  Then I can use simple filenames to read files.

The other advice I usually give is to specify "file.choose()" instead of 
an explicit filename; this will open a file selection dialog.  (In my 
opinion, this should be the default, but some people disagree quite 
strongly.)

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> 3) You can use read.csv which is the read.table variant for CSV files.
> 
> 
> For example
> 
>   a <- read.csv( file="c:/Progra~1/Docume~1/ramasamy/x111.csv" )
> 
> might work if you replace it with your full path. If you have the
> _unique_ rownames in the first column, you can add the argument
> "row.names=1" in the call.
> 
> Regards, Adai
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, 2006-02-21 at 08:52 -0500, Carl Klarner wrote:
>> Hello,
>> I am a very new user of R.  I've spent several hours trying to import
>> data, so I feel okay asking the list for help.  I had an Excel file,
>> then I turned it into a "csv" file, as instructed by directions.  My
>> filename is "x111.csv."  I then used the following commands to read this
>> (fairly small) dataset in.  
>> 
>> x111 <-read.table(file='x111.csv',
>> sep="",header=T,
>> quote="",comment.char="",as.is=T)
>> 
>> I then get the following error message.
>> 
>> Error in file(file, "r") : unable to open connection
>> In addition: Warning message:
>> cannot open file 'x111.csv', reason 'No such file or directory'
>> 
>> I would imagine I'm not putting my csv file in the right location for R
>> to be able to read it.  If that's the case, where should I put it?  Or
>> is there something else I need to do to it first?
>> Thanks for your help,
>> Carl
>> 
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> 
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