Reading tabular data with readr package

Tue, 14 Apr 2015 11:00:57 +0000

Recently, Hadley Wickham introduced a new package to read tabular data (such as CSV), lines and entire files.

Advantages include:

1. Helpful defaults over base R read.csv such as: Characters are never automatically converted to factors and row names are never set.

2. Faster reads.

3. When reading large files, a progress bar is displayed.

4. A very useful problems() function that allows you to zoom into rows of data that readr has issues loading into for e.g. expected integer for this column but actual data is text.

Readr on Yoke Keong

Reading tabular data with readr package