This information and advice is indeed very useful. Some would wonder, however, whether a file delimited with semi- colons can still be called a CSV file. Excel Help has "CSV (Comma delimited) format") ;-)
Regards, Andrew C. Ward CAPE Centre Department of Chemical Engineering The University of Queensland Brisbane Qld 4072 Australia [EMAIL PROTECTED] Quoting David Firth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Many thanks to those who replied to my question. > > 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 > > > > ______________________________________________ > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list > > https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > > > > ______________________________________________ > [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list > https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help