The “read_delim” Function in R

• Package: readr

• Purpose: To read a delimited text file into a data frame.

• General Class: Data Import

• Required Argument(s):

• file: The path to the delimited text file to read.

• delim: The delimiter used in the file.

• Notable Optional Arguments:

• col_names: Logical. If TRUE, the first row of the file is treated as the column names. The default is TRUE.

• skip: Integer. Number of lines to skip before reading data. The default is 0.

• na: Character vector specifying additional strings to interpret as missing values. The default is c(““,”NA”).

• Example (with Explanation):

• # Load necessary packages
  library(readr)
  
  # Read a pipe-delimited file into a data frame
  data <- read_delim("data.txt", delim = "|")
  
  # Display the structure of the data frame
  str(data)

• In this example, the read_delim function from the readr package is used to read a delimited text file named “data.txt” into a data frame called data. The delimiter used in the file is specified as a pipe (“|”). By default, the function assumes that the first row of the file contains column names. The structure of the resulting data frame is then displayed using the str function. This function is commonly used to import delimited text data into R for analysis.