Section 2.6 Delimited Files
Sometimes, tab-separated files are saved with the .txt file extension. TXT files can store tabular data, but they can also store simple text. Thus, while TSV is the more appropriate extension for tabular data that are tab-separated, you’ll often run into tabular data that individuals have saved as a TXT file. In these cases, you’ll want to use the more generic
read_delim() function from readr.
Google Sheets does not allow tab-separated files to be downloaded with the .txt file extension (since .tsv is more appropriate); however, if you were to have a file "sample_data.txt" uploaded into R, you could use the following code to read it into your R Environment, where "\t" specifies that the file is tab-delimited.
Subsection 2.6.1 Reading Delimited Files into R
## read TXT into R
df_txt <- read_delim("sample_data.txt", delim = "\t")
## look at the object
head(df_txt)
This function allows you to specify how the file you’re reading is in delimited. This means, rather than R knowing by default whether or not the data are comma- or tab- separated, you’ll have to specify it within the argument
delim in the function.
The
read_delim() function is a more generic version of read_csv(). What this means is that you could use read_delim() to read in a CSV file. You would just need to specify that the file was comma-delimited if you were to use that function.
