[R] need help opening a file

[David Winsemius]

"Sudhindra Gadagkar" <suragg8 at gmail.com> wrote in
news:4726c6d80801261838u4b2aa3b2x118b6f5470bd9301 at mail.gmail.com: 

> Hi, I can't believe I am unable to do this.  I just installed R
> (never used it before, but want to learn it).  At present, though.
> all I want to do is export a data file (specifically "crabs" in the
> MASS library) to a text file for use in SPSS.  It allows me to peek
> into the dataset, using the command head(crabs) but I can neither
> view the entire file nor can I seem to export it to a text file. I
> have been trying to get help from the online help for several hours
> now!  Maybe I just don't know what to search for. Frustrating!  Help
> would be much appreciated.  Thx, S. 
> 
>      [[alternative HTML version deleted]]

write.table should provide the basic function. It is designed to write 
datafames:

 write.table(crabs, file="crab.out.csv", sep=",")

... will give you a comma separated file:
... first five lines 
"sp","sex","index","FL","RW","CL","CW","BD"
"1","B","M",1,8.1,6.7,16.1,19,7
"2","B","M",2,8.8,7.7,18.1,20.8,7.4
"3","B","M",3,9.2,7.8,19,22.4,7.7
"4","B","M",4,9.6,7.9,20.1,23.1,8.2
.
.
.

If you are working in Windows, and want to specify a directory, you 
need to use forward slashes in the full filename. The backslash 
character has special meaning in *NIX systems, which is where R was 
developed.

If you want to "see" the dataframe, crabs, just type the name. You 
should see 200 lines of data.


-- 
David Winsemius