Learn R

When importing from a command, a csv file can be imported using the function read.csv(). 

The general structure of read.csv is 

data_frame_name_in_R <- read.csv('path/of/file/name', header = TRUE)

Please Note: there are specific types of functions available for different file formats. 

Suppose we have a csv file in our P drive, so we would do the following to import it.

 df <- read.csv('P:/r_tutorial/NHS-99M001X-E-2011-pumf-individuals_F1.csv', header = TRUE) 

#  the data is stored in data frame named df

NOTE: make sure to keep forward slashes (/) in the pathname.

The CSV is imported as a df – data frame

• A data frame is a table or a two-dimensional array-like structure in which each column contains values of one variable and each row contains one set of values from each column.
• Header is TRUE if file contains the names of the variables as its first line

R can be used to import a wide variety of files from csv to json. For this guide, we will be importing a csv file and working on it.

Files can be imported by GUI in R Studio. Follow the steps below.

• Click on File, then “Import Dataset”.
• Select the type of data you want to import. Choose csv.

A dialog box will appear. Browse to the csv dataset. 

Select it and click on “Open” and then  “Import”.

You can also import an SPSS data file (.sav) in R, using the read.spss() command.

Firstly, make sure that you have loaded the "foreign" package.

> library(foreign) 

Then you can use the read.spss command as shown below:

>df <- read.spss('C:/Users/owner/Downloads/NHS-99M001X-E-2011-pumf-individuals/NHS-99M001X-E-2011-pumf-individuals_F1.sav', use.value.labels = TRUE, to.data.frame = TRUE) 

Here we have 2 extra parameters apart from the first one, which is the location of the .sav file. 

"use.value.labels" is set to TRUE if you want to retain the value labels. 

"to.data.frame" is set to TRUE, if it is FALSE (default), the df would be a list instead of a data frame. 

For a list of all the parameters for this function, please refer to: https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/foreign/html/read.spss.html

You can also import a STATA data file (.dta) in R, using the read.dta() command.

Firstly, make sure that you have loaded the "foreign" package.

> library(foreign) 

Then you can use the read.dta command as shown below:

> mydata <- read.dta('C:/Users/owner/Downloads/NHS-99M001X-E-2011-pumf-individuals/NHS-99M001X-E-2011-pumf-individuals_F1.dta')

For a list of all the parameters for this function, please refer to: https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/foreign/html/read.dta.html