Data Import and Export

Last updated: January 18, 2021

The rio package

The rio package provides a simple interface for importing and exporting data through common import() and export() functions. File type is inferred from the file name extension.

Writing CSV files

For large datasets, use fwrite() from data.table. It is much faster than readr::write_csv().

Serialization

Serialization is reading/writing data frames from a file, while maintaining metadata like column type. It is similar to using .csv as an export format, but this doesn’t maintain metadata and can be much slower.

• fst
• RDS: see readr::read_rds() and the accompanying write_rds() function.

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