library(data.table)
bcw <- fread("https://github.com/EpistasisLab/penn-ml-benchmarks/raw/master/datasets/classification/breast-cancer-wisconsin/breast-cancer-wisconsin.tsv.gz")12 data.table Data I/O
12.1 Read delimited data with fread()
data.table’s “fast read” function fread() offers a replacement for the base read.csv() command. By default, it creates a data.table object, which is likely preferred in most scenarios, but it can create a data.frame by setting data.table = FALSE.
It is very useful because it allows:
- very fast, parallelized reading of large delimited files, e.g. with millions of rows
- can directly read zipped files
- smart automatic discovery of delimiters when
sep = "auto"(default) - multiple other conveniences
As an example, you can read a gzipped file directly from a URL:
12.1.1 See also
12.2 Write delimited data with fwrite()
fwrite() similarly provides a faster, parallelized, and more flexible replacement for write.csv():
fwrite(dat, "/path/to/file.csv")