How to Read csv Data Into R

Comma separated values or .csv file are among the most common formats for data. In this code clip we look at three ways to read csv data into R: with the base R read.csv() function, with the tidyverse function read_csv() and with the data.table library function fread().

Code used in this clip:

Read csv (comma separated values) files

data ＜- read.csv("../input/titanic/train.csv")

head(data)


Read csv faster with readr

library(readr)

data ＜- read_csv("../input/titanic/train.csv")

head(data)


Read data super fast with data.table and fread

library(data.table)

data ＜- fread("../input/titanic/train.csv")

head(data)



Code Clips are basic code explanations in 3 minutes or less. They are intended to be short reference guides that provide quick breakdowns and copy/paste access to code needed to accomplish common data science tasks. Think Stack Overflow with a video explanation.


Note: YouTube does not allow greater than or less than symbols in the text description, so the code above will not be exactly the same as the code shown in the video! For R that means I may use = for assignment and the special Unicode large ＜ and ＞ symbols in place of the standard sized ones for dplyr pipes and comparisons. These special symbols should work as expected for R code on Windows, but may need to be replaced with standard greater than and less than symbols for other operating systems.