Create Rectangular text data

Let’s create a Rectangular text data of columns named “Name” , “Age”, “City” and story value in data.txt. Create a dataframe with columns “Name”, “Age”, “City” and store its value in respective column. And save the data frame to a tab-delimited text file and create a text file with name “data.txt”

Step 1: Create a dataframe with columns “Name”, “Age”, “City” and store its value in respective column.

data.frame() function create a dataframe. It has three columns: “Name”, “Age”, and “City”. Values for each column are provided using the c() function, which concatenates values into a vector for each column.

Step2: Save the data frame to a tab-delimited text file and create a text file with name “data.txt

write.table() function save the dataframe to a text file.
file = "data.txt" confirm the file name to be "data.txt".
sep = "\t" sets the separator as a tab.
row.names = FALSE says that row names are not present in the output.
quote = FALSE state that quotes are not used around character fields.

Output:

Name    Age    City
Mina    25    India
Nora    30    Germany
Tina    22    NY
Ram    28    America

We can get this file in files section in R enviourment.

This code will create a table in text document named as “data.txt” and store at the same folder where R studio is

Efficient Data Manipulation with data.table

Now, it’s time to install package “data.table” and load it

Activating the “data.table” Package (library(data.table)) – This line activates the “data.table” package, This package generates a powerful and fast data manipulation framework in R.

Reading Rectangular Text Data (for txt file)

Read data.txt with tab delimiter, headers, and specified column types as name is character, age is numeric and country is character.

• fread() is a function from the “data.table” package in R reads for fast and efficient data from different file formats.
• header = TRUE confirms that the first row in the file contains column names.
• colClasses = c(“character”, “numeric”, “character”) tells the classes of the columns in the output dataframe.
• “data.txt” is the file path of the text file to be read.

Output:

   Name Age    City
1: Mina  25   India
2: Nora  30 Germany
3: Tina  22      NY
4:  Ram  28 America

Writing Rectangular Text Data (for txt file)

Assuming ‘data’ is your rectangular data. Write data to output.txt with tab delimiter, no quoting! Data is the dataframe that will be written to the text file “Output.txt”. It is an output file. ‘sep = “\t”‘ sets the separator as a tab. ‘quote = FALSE’ state that quotes are not used around character fields.

Output:

   Name Age    City
1: Mina  25   India
2: Nora  30 Germany
3: Tina  22      NY
4:  Ram  28 America

Reading and writing rectangular text data quickly in R Programming Language can be achieved using various packages and functions, depending on your specific needs and the data format. Two commonly used packages for this purpose are readr and data. table. Here’s how you can do it with these packages.