Import - Export

Most computer programming tasks involve the processing or analysis of data, and unless we are doing a simulation, that data has not been created within the program that is supposed to process it. We’ll learn some basic techniques for importing data into R, saving it for future use, and exporting it for use by others.

We’ll go through several methods on how to import a wide range of data. Sometimes it’s as simple as calling a function, but some cases require both tidying and transforming in order to get to the tidy goal.

Import is the start of the data science process — Data import is the beginning of the data science process

Packages

There are important packages we’ll discuss over the process, keep in mind that plenty more exist that we won’t cover.

haven If you’re working with data from SPSS, Stata, and SAS files, and xml12 if you’re working with XML data.