Reading excel files with readxl R package

Tue, 31 Mar 2015 11:00:05 +0000

Recently, Hadley Wickham introduced a new package to read Excel files (XLS, XLSX). The main advantage is that no external dependencies is required for readxl. (xlsx package requires Java Runtime to be installed)

With xlsx:

1library(xlsx)
2library(httr)
3url <- "https://rawgit.com/yoke2/dsxref/master/iris.xlsx"
4GET(url, write_disk("iris.xlsx", overwrite=TRUE))
5iris <- read.xlsx("iris.xlsx", sheetIndex=1, header=TRUE)
6head(iris, 3)

1## NA. Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
2## 1 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa
3## 2 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa
4## 3 3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa

With readxl:

Readxl on Yoke Keong

Reading excel files with readxl R package