Data() and CSV files
"McGehee, Robert" <Robert.McGehee at geodecapital.com> writes:
Hello, For reasons I don't understand, data() imports CSV (Comma-Separated Values) as if they were delimited by semicolons instead of commas. (Are semicolon-separated Comma-Separated-Value files common somewhere?) Given that this is the case, if I choose to put comma-delimited CSV files in my data directory, what is the preferred method of loading these into memory?
Semicolon-separated CSV's are common in various parts of Europe, but usually coincident with comma as decimal separator (cf. read.csv/read.csv2). I can't remember whether there was a reason for the choice in data().
data("filename")
would be nice, but not applicable given the above conversion issue.
So, this was the best I came up with:
read.csv(file.path(.find.package("pkg"), "data", paste("filename",
"csv", sep = ".")))
However, given that others undoubtedly like to include (non-semicolon)
.csv files in their packages and load them easily, I would like to know
if there is a more elegant way to load these files. Perhaps an
annotation in the data/00Index or /data/datalist file that I am unaware
of?
One trick is that .R files are processed before other files, so a mydata.R
file containing mydata <- read.csv("mydata.csv") should do the trick.
It messes with lazy loading of data sets though.
An alternative is to preprocess the data set to (say) .Rda format.
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