read.table and delimiters in R Programming - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Reading Data with read.table and Delimiters in R

📖 Scenario: You have a small data file with information about fruits and their prices separated by commas. You want to read this data into R for analysis.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to use read.table with the correct delimiter to load data from a text file into a data frame.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a text file with fruit data separated by commas

Set a variable for the file path

Use read.table with the correct delimiter to read the file

Print the resulting data frame

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Reading data files with different delimiters is common when working with data from various sources like spreadsheets or exported reports.

💼 Career

Data analysts and scientists often need to import data correctly to analyze it, so knowing how to use read.table with delimiters is essential.

1

Create a CSV data file

Create a text file called fruits.csv with the following content exactly:
Fruit,Price Apple,1.2 Banana,0.5 Cherry,2.5

R Programming

# Create the file fruits.csv with the exact content
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use writeLines() to create the file with the exact lines.

2

Set the file path variable

Create a variable called file_path and set it to the string "fruits.csv".

R Programming

writeLines(c("Fruit,Price", "Apple,1.2", "Banana,0.5", "Cherry,2.5"), "fruits.csv")
# Create the variable file_path with the value "fruits.csv"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the assignment operator <- to assign the string to file_path.

3

Read the CSV file using read.table

Use read.table with the variable file_path, set header = TRUE, and set the sep argument to a comma ",". Store the result in a variable called fruit_data.

R Programming

writeLines(c("Fruit,Price", "Apple,1.2", "Banana,0.5", "Cherry,2.5"), "fruits.csv")
file_path <- "fruits.csv"
# Read the file using read.table with header=TRUE and sep="," into fruit_data
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Remember to set header = TRUE to read the first line as column names.

4

Print the data frame

Print the variable fruit_data to display the data frame.

R Programming

writeLines(c("Fruit,Price", "Apple,1.2", "Banana,0.5", "Cherry,2.5"), "fruits.csv")
file_path <- "fruits.csv"
fruit_data <- read.table(file_path, header = TRUE, sep = ",")
# Print fruit_data
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(fruit_data) to show the data frame.