Dear R-helpers, I know of two ways to reading data within an R program, using textConnection and stdin (demo program below). I've Googled about and looked in several books for comparisons of the two approaches but haven't found anything. Are there any particular advantages or disadvantages to these two approaches? If you were teaching R beginners, which would you present?
Thanks, Bob http://RforSASandSPSSusers.com # R Program to Read Data Within a Program. # Very similar to SAS datalines or cards statements, # and SPSS BEGIN DATA / END DATA commands. # This stores the data as one long text string. mystring <- "workshop,gender,q1,q2,q3,q4 01,1,f,1,1,5,1 02,2,f,2,1,4,1 03,1,f,2,2,4,3 04,2, ,3,1, ,3 05,1,m,4,5,2,4 06,2,m,5,4,5,5 07,1,m,5,3,4,4 08,2,m,4,5,5,5" # The textConnection function allows read.csv to # read data from the text string just as it would # from a file. # The leading zero on first column helps show that # R is storing row names as a character vector. mydata <- read.csv( textConnection(mystring) ) mydata mydata <- read.csv( stdin() ) workshop,gender,q1,q2,q3,q4 01,1,f,1,1,5,1 02,2,f,2,1,4,1 03,1,f,2,2,4,3 04,2, ,3,1, ,3 05,1,m,4,5,2,4 06,2,m,5,4,5,5 07,1,m,5,3,4,4 08,2,m,4,5,5,5 #The blank line above tells R to stop reading. mydata # Read it again stripping out blanks and setting # "nothing" to be missing for gender. mydata <- read.csv( stdin(), strip.white=TRUE, na.strings="" ) workshop,gender,q1,q2,q3,q4 01,1,f,1,1,5,1 02,2,f,2,1,4,1 03,1,f,2,2,4,3 04,2, ,3,1, ,3 05,1,m,4,5,2,4 06,2,m,5,4,5,5 07,1,m,5,3,4,4 08,2,m,4,5,5,5 mydata ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
