Dirk's suggestion, to use a .R file in the "data" directory of the package, specifying how the .csv should be read, works fine as an answer to the question about making comma-separated files available.
Uwe's answer to my other question (; vs ,), ie compatibility with existing R packages, is well taken!
Cheers, David
On Thursday, Jul 10, 2003, at 12:25 Europe/London, Uwe Ligges wrote:
Andreas Christmann wrote:--------------------------------------------------------------------- -
Message: 1 Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 10:53:27 +0100 From: David Firth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [R] packaged datasets in .csv format To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
A couple of questions in connection with using .csv format to include data in a package:
First, the background. The data() function loads data from .csv ("comma-separated values") files using
read.table(..., header = TRUE, sep = ";")
But ?read.table says
## To write a CSV file for input to Excel one might use write.table(x, file = "foo.csv", sep = ",", col.names = NA) ## and to read this file back into R one needs read.table("file.csv", header = TRUE, sep = ",", row.names=1)
As a result, .csv files created by write.table() as above are not read in by data() in the way that might be expected [that is, expected by someone who had not read help(data)!]
Two questions, then:
-- is there some compelling reason for the use of `sep = ";"' in place of `sep = ",", row.names=1'?
Do you really want an answer? Today, one reason is compatibility to all the other packages on CRAN.
I prefer ";" instead of "," , because in text variables there are often ",".
That's why text variables can be quoted.
-- if I want to maintain a dataset in .csv format, for use both in R and in other systems such as Excel, SPSS, etc, what is the best way to go about it?
When regularly using that many systems on the same data sets, it might be worth using a database system, e.g. MySQL.
BTW: R *and* Excel *and* (for sure, but I haven't tested) also SPSS can read a couple of different ASCII formatted files, so there are quite a lot possible formats.
Uwe Ligges
>Depends. Perhaps it is best to check it out for the software packages and the versions of the software packages you are using.Andreas Christmann
Any advice would be much appreciated.
Cheers, David
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