What are ASCII files?
- American *Standard Code for Information Interchange
- Wikipedia
- ASCII files contain data in a tidy format without any metacharacters
- favourite format for communication with R
Loading data into R
file.exists("set1_set2.csv")
## [1] TRUE
sets <- read.table("set1_set2.csv", header=TRUE) # read from disk and store in variable "sets"
class(sets)
## [1] "data.frame"
dim(sets)
## [1] 300 2
head(sets)
## set1 set2
## 1 1.8329159 3.730824
## 2 0.5397876 5.064780
## 3 1.2170686 5.958580
## 4 1.3883328 2.029921
## 5 1.7145705 2.378172
## 6 0.8423617 1.399623
sets1 <- read.csv("set1_set2.csv", header=TRUE) # alternative (header=TRUE is default)
class(sets1)
## [1] "data.frame"
Exporting data from R
write.table(sets, file = "my_ascii.txt")
file.exists("my_ascii.txt")
## [1] TRUE
Getting data from the web
pinched_data <- read.csv("https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stat/data/binary.csv")
head(pinched_data)
## admit gre gpa rank
## 1 0 380 3.61 3
## 2 1 660 3.67 3
## 3 1 800 4.00 1
## 4 1 640 3.19 4
## 5 0 520 2.93 4
## 6 1 760 3.00 2