R read.table() Function - Reading Table Files

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The R read.table() function is a lower-level general version of read.csv(), used to read delimited text files.

read.table() can handle files in various delimiter formats, such as TSV (tab-separated), fixed-width, etc.

The syntax of the read.table() function is as follows:

read.table(file, header = FALSE, sep = "", dec = ".",
           comment.char = "#", na.strings = "NA")

Parameter description:

  • fileFile path.

  • headerWhether the first row is used as column names.

  • sepSeparator; an empty string means whitespace separation.

  • comment.charComment character; lines starting with this character are ignored.

  • na.stringsStrings to be treated as NA values.

Example

# Write a tab-separated file
write.table(mtcars[1:5, 1:3], "temp_mtcars.tsv",
            sep = "\t", row.names = FALSE)

# View the original content
print("TSV file content:")
cat(readLines("temp_mtcars.tsv"), sep = "\n")

# Read the tab-separated file
data <- read.table("temp_mtcars.tsv", header = TRUE, sep = "\t")
print("\n"Read back the data:")
print(data)

Executing the above code produces the following output:

[1] "TSV 文件内容:"
"mpg"  "cyl"  "disp"
"21"   "6"   "160"
"21"   "6"   "160"
"22.8" "4"   "108"
"21.4" "6"   "258"
"18.7" "8"   "360"

[1] "读回的数据:"
   mpg cyl disp
1 21.0   6  160
2 21.0   6  160
3 22.8   4  108
4 21.4   6  258
5 18.7   8  360

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