Writing Data From R to txt|csv Files: R Base Functions
Previously, we described R base functions (read.delim() and read.csv()) for importing txt and csv files into R.
In this article, you’ll learn how to export or write data from R to .txt (tab-separated values) and .csv (comma-separated values) file formats.
Preleminary tasks
R base functions for writing data
The R base function write.table() can be used to export a data frame or a matrix to a file.
A simplified format is as follow:
write.table(x, file, append = FALSE, sep = " ", dec = ".", row.names = TRUE, col.names = TRUE)
- x: a matrix or a data frame to be written.
- file: a character specifying the name of the result file.
- sep: the field separator string, e.g., sep = “\t” (for tab-separated value).
- dec: the string to be used as decimal separator. Default is “.”
- row.names: either a logical value indicating whether the row names of x are to be written along with x, or a character vector of row names to be written.
- col.names: either a logical value indicating whether the column names of x are to be written along with x, or a character vector of column names to be written. If col.names = NA and row.names = TRUE a blank column name is added, which is the convention used for CSV files to be read by spreadsheets.
It’s also possible to write csv files using the functions write.csv() and write.csv2().
- write.csv() uses “.” for the decimal point and a comma (“,”) for the separator.
- write.csv2() uses a comma (“,”) for the decimal point and a semicolon (“;”) for the separator.
The syntax is as follow:
write.csv(my_data, file = "my_data.csv") write.csv2(my_data, file = "my_data.csv")
Writing data to a file
The R code below exports the built-in R mtcars data set to a tab-separated ( sep = “\t”) file called mtcars.txt in the current working directory:
# Loading mtcars data data("mtcars") # Writing mtcars data write.table(mtcars, file = "mtcars.txt", sep = "\t", row.names = TRUE, col.names = NA)
If you don’t want to write row names, use row.names = FALSE as follow:
write.table(mtcars, file = "mtcars.txt", sep = "\t", row.names = FALSE)
Summary
- Write data from R to a txt file: write.table(my_data, file = “my_data.txt”, sep = “”)
- Write data from R to a csv file: write.csv(my_data, file = “my_data.csv”)
Related articles
- Previous chapters
- R programming basics
- Importing data into R
- Fast Writing of Data From R to txt|csv Files: readr package
- Writing data from R to Excel files (xls|xlsx)
- Saving data into R data format: RDATA and RDS
Infos
This analysis has been performed using R (ver. 3.2.3).
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