Writing data to a file
Problem
You want to write data to a file.
Solution
Writing to a delimited text file
The easiest way to do this is to use write.csv(). By default, write.csv() includes row names, but these are usually unnecessary and may cause confusion.
# A sample data frame data <- read.table(header=T, con <- textConnection(' subject sex size 1 M 7 2 F NA 3 F 9 4 M 11 ')) close(con) # Write to a file, suppress row names write.csv(data, "data.csv", row.names=FALSE) # Same, except that instead of "NA", output blank cells write.csv(data, "data.csv", row.names=FALSE, na="") # Use tabs, suppress row names and column names write.table(data, "data.csv", sep="\t", row.names=FALSE, col.names=FALSE)
Saving in R data format
Using write.csv() and write.table() will not preserve special attributes of the data structures, such as whether a column is a character type or factor, or the order of levels in factors. In order to do that, it should be written out in a special format for R.
# Save in a text format that can be easily loaded in R dump("data", "data.Rdmpd") # To load the data again: source("data.Rdmpd") # Saving in R binary format which is more compact save("data", file="data.RData") # To load the data again: load("data.RData")