[R-pkg-devel] data function from utils package

[Hana Sevcikova]

Another option is to put an R file of the same name as your dataset into 
the "data" directory and specify how your data should be read. I use it 
whenever I need to overwrite other arguments from the default 
read.table. If you have e.g. mydata.csv, a file mydata.R would contain 
this line:

mydata <- read.table("mydata.csv", sep=",") # possibly with other args


Hana


On 16/08/2016 12:48, Fox, John wrote:
> Dear Mike,
>
> Perhaps it's stating the obvious, but why not save the .csv file
> with
";" as the delimiter using the sep argument to write.csv() or
write.table(), or save as a .txt file with " " as the delimiter?
>
> Although I don't know why ";" was chosen in preference to "," for
data(), I doubt that it's a bug since the behaviour corresponds to
what's in ?data, as you noted.
>
> I hope this helps,
>  John
>
> --------------------------------------
> John Fox, Professor
> McMaster University
> Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
> Web: socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox
>
>
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: R-package-devel [mailto:r-package-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On
>> Behalf Of Mike Mehan
>> Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2016 3:29 PM
>> To: r-package-devel at r-project.org
>> Subject: [R-pkg-devel] data function from utils package
>>
>> Hi,
>> I'm having trouble loading a csv file from my package data directory
>> using the data() function. We have an external file that gets updated
>> every month or so that we would like to include as data in our package.
>> We are able to import it using the data function when it is saved as an
>> R Data file but when we save it as a csv file it fails. I checked the
>> help for data and it says that it supports csv files but it says that it
>> calls read.table with the separator as a semi-colon instead of a comma.
>> I checked the source code and it also uses a semi-colon. Is this a bug?
>> I would be really nice to be able to use csv files since we refresh this
>> file fairly often and I'd rather not have to save it as an R data file
>> each time. We also got it working with system.file but using data() is
>> much cleaner. Any suggestions?
>> Thanks,
>> Mike
>>
>> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
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