Read a sample from sas7bdat file in R - r

I have a sas7bdat file of size around 80 GB. Since my pc has a memory of 4 GB the only way I can see is reading some of its rows. I tried using the sas7bdat package in R which gives the error "big endian files are not supported"
The read_sas() function in haven seems to work but the function supports reading specific columns only while I need to read any subset of rows with all columns. For example, it will be fine if I can read 1% of the data to understand it.
Is there any way to do this? Any package which can work?
Later on I plan to read parts of the file and divide it into 100 or so sections

If you have Windows you can use the SAS Universal Viewer, which is free, and export the dataset to CSV. Then you can import the CSV into R in more readable chunks using this method.

Related

Import .rds file to h2o frame directly

I have a large .rds file saved and I trying to directly import .rds file to h2o frame using some functionality, because it is not feasible for me to read that file in R enviornment and then use as.h2o function to convert.
I am looking for some fast and efficient way to deal with it.
My attempts:
I have tried to read that file and then convert it into h2o frame. But, it is way much time consuming process.
I tried saving file in .csv format and using h2o.import() with parse=T.
Due to memory constraint I was not able to save complete dataframe.
Please suggest me any efficient way to do it.
Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.
The native read/write functionality in R is not very efficient, so I'd recommend using data.table for that. Both options below make use of data.table in some way.
First, I'd recommend trying the following: Once you install the data.table package, and load the h2o library, set options("h2o.use.data.table"=TRUE). What that will do is make sure that as.h2o() uses data.table underneath for the conversion from an R data.frame to an H2O Frame. Something to note about how as.h2o() works -- it writes the file from R to disk and then reads it back again into H2O using h2o.importFile(), H2O's parallel file-reader.
There is another option, which is effectively the same thing, though your RAM doesn't need to store two copies of the data at once (one in R and one in H2O), so it might be more efficient if you are really strapped for resources.
Save the file as a CSV or a zipped CSV. If you are having issues saving the data frame to disk as a CSV, then you should make sure you're using an efficient file writer like data.table::fwrite(). Once you have the file on disk, read it directly into H2O using h2o.importFile().

exporting R data.table in .txt or .csv format

In these days I have run into a problem of data export from R to a more “common” format as .csv or .txt.
My dataset is in data.table format and has 149000 rows * 124 columns. I adopt the following lines of code to try to export it:
write.table(data_reduced,"directory/data_reduced.txt",sep="\t",row.names=FALSE)
write.csv2(data_reduced,"directory/data_reduced.csv")
The result, in both cases, is that the .txt or .csv files have a lower number of rows than they are supposed to do and this changes with the different trials I did (it ranges from 900 to 1800, more or less). Usually what I get are the first rows and then the very last one.
I have tried to transform the data.table in a matrix or data.frame but the result I get is more or less the same. I have also tried to adopt the write.xlsx function but I have some problems with Java (which is something common as I have noticed reading the SO forum and other web sources).
I have also read about a function called fwrite to export very large datasets but it looks like that my RStudio cannot find it, despite I installed the data.table package.
Can anyone give me an explanation/solution for this problem? I've been reading different sources to sort it out but with no success until now.
I use RStudio Version 0.99.473.

use readOGR to load in a large spatial file in R

For my processes in R I want to read in a 20 gigabyte file. I got it in a XML file type.
In R I cannot load it in with readOGR since it is to big. It gives me the error cannot allocate vector 99.8 mb.
Since my file is to big the logical next step in my mind would be to split the file. But since I can not open it in R and any other GIS package at hand, I can not split the file before I load it in. I am already using the best PC to my availability.
Is there a solution?
UPDATE BECAUSE OF COMMENT
If I use head() my line looks like underneath. It does not work unfortunately.
headfive <- head(readOGR('file.xml', layer = 'layername'),5)

Reading excel with R

I am trying to contemplate whether to read excel files directly from R or should I convert them to csv first. I have researched about the various possibilities of reading excel. I also found out that reading excel might have its cons like conversion of date and numeric column data types etc.
XLConnect - dependent on java
read.xslx - slow for large data sets
read.xslx2 - fast but need to use colClasses command to specify desired column classes
ODBC - may have conversion issues
gdata - dependent on perl
I am looking for a solution that will be fast enough for atleast a million rows with minimum data conversion issues . Any suggestions??
EDIT
So finally i have decided to convert to csv and then read the csv file but now I have to figure out the best way to read a large csv file(with atleast 1 million rows)
I found out about the read.csv.ffdf package but that does not let me set my own colClass. Specifically this
setAs("character","myDate", function(from){ classFun(from) } )
colClasses =c("numeric", "character", "myDate", "numeric", "numeric", "myDate")
z<-read.csv.ffdf(file=pathCsv, colClasses=colClassesffdf)
This does not work and i get the following error :-
Error in ff(initdata = initdata, length = length, levels = levels,
ordered = ordered, : vmode 'list' not implemented
I am also aware of the RSQlite and ODBC functionality but do not wish to use it . Is there a solution to the above error or any other way around this?
Since this question, Hadley Wickham has released the R package readxl which wraps C and C++ libraries to read both .xls and .xlsx files, respectively. It is a big improvement on the previous possibilities, but not without problems. It is fast and simple, but if you have messy data, you will have to do some work whichever method you choose. Going down the .csv route isn't a terrible idea, but does introduce a manual step in your analysis, and relies on whichever version of Excel you happen to use giving consistent CSV output.
All the solutions you mentioned will work - but if manually converting to .csv and reading with read.csv is an option, I'd recommend that. In my experience it is faster and easier to get right.
If you want speed and large data, then you might consider converting your excel file(s) to a database format, then connect R to the database.
A quick Google search showed several links for converting Excel files to SQLite databases, then you could use the RSQlite or sqldf package to read into R.
Or use the ODBC package if you convert to one of the databases that work with ODBC. The conversion of fields problems should be less if you are do the conversion to database correctly.

Importing Excel files into R, xlsx or xls

Please can someone help me on the best way to import an excel 2007 (.xlsx) file into R. I have tried several methods and none seems to work. I have upgraded to 2.13.1, windows XP, xlsx 0.3.0, I don't know why the error keeps coming up. I tried:
AB<-read.xlsx("C:/AB_DNA_Tag_Numbers.xlsx","DNA_Tag_Numbers")
OR
AB<-read.xlsx("C:/AB_DNA_Tag_Numbers.xlsx",1)
but I get the error:
Error in .jnew("java/io/FileInputStream", file) :
java.io.FileNotFoundException: C:\AB_DNA_Tag_Numbers.xlsx (The system cannot find the file specified)
Thank you.
For a solution that is free of fiddly external dependencies*, there is now readxl:
The readxl package makes it easy to get data out of Excel and into R.
Compared to many of the existing packages (e.g. gdata, xlsx,
xlsReadWrite) readxl has no external dependencies so it's easy to
install and use on all operating systems. It is designed to work with
tabular data stored in a single sheet.
Readxl supports both the legacy .xls format and the modern xml-based
.xlsx format. .xls support is made possible the with libxls C library,
which abstracts away many of the complexities of the underlying binary
format. To parse .xlsx, we use the RapidXML C++ library.
It can be installed like so:
install.packages("readxl") # CRAN version
or
devtools::install_github("hadley/readxl") # development version
Usage
library(readxl)
# read_excel reads both xls and xlsx files
read_excel("my-old-spreadsheet.xls")
read_excel("my-new-spreadsheet.xlsx")
# Specify sheet with a number or name
read_excel("my-spreadsheet.xls", sheet = "data")
read_excel("my-spreadsheet.xls", sheet = 2)
# If NAs are represented by something other than blank cells,
# set the na argument
read_excel("my-spreadsheet.xls", na = "NA")
* not strictly true, it requires the Rcpp package, which in turn requires Rtools (for Windows) or Xcode (for OSX), which are dependencies external to R. But they don't require any fiddling with paths, etc., so that's an advantage over Java and Perl dependencies.
Update There is now the rexcel package. This promises to get Excel formatting, functions and many other kinds of information from the Excel file and into R.
You may also want to try the XLConnect package. I've had better luck with it than xlsx (plus it can read .xls files too).
library(XLConnect)
theData <- readWorksheet(loadWorkbook("C:/AB_DNA_Tag_Numbers.xlsx"),sheet=1)
also, if you are having trouble with your file not being found, try selecting it with file.choose().
I would definitely try the read.xls function in the gdata package, which is considerably more mature than the xlsx package. It may require Perl ...
Update
As the Answer below is now somewhat outdated, I'd just draw attention to the readxl package. If the Excel sheet is well formatted/lain out then I would now use readxl to read from the workbook. If sheets are poorly formatted/lain out then I would still export to CSV and then handle the problems in R either via read.csv() or plain old readLines().
Original
My preferred way is to save individual Excel sheets in comma separated value (CSV) files. On Windows, these files are associated with Excel so you don't loose the double-click-open-in-Excel "feature".
CSV files can be read into R using read.csv(), or, if you are in a location or using a computer set up with some European settings (where , is used as the decimal place), using read.csv2().
These functions have sensible defaults that makes reading appropriately formatted files simple. Just keep any labels for samples or variables in the first row or column.
Added benefits of storing files in CSV are that as the files are plain text they can be passed around very easily and you can be confident they will open anywhere; one doesn't need Excel to look at or edit the data.
Example 2012:
library("xlsx")
FirstTable <- read.xlsx("MyExcelFile.xlsx", 1 , stringsAsFactors=F)
SecondTable <- read.xlsx("MyExcelFile.xlsx", 2 , stringsAsFactors=F)
I would try 'xlsx' package for it is easy to handle and seems mature enough
worked fine for me and did not need any additionals like Perl or whatever
Example 2015:
library("readxl")
FirstTable <- read_excel("MyExcelFile.xlsx", 1)
SecondTable <- read_excel("MyExcelFile.xlsx", 2)
nowadays I use readxl and have made good experience with it.
no extra stuff needed
good performance
This new package looks nice http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/openxlsx/openxlsx.pdf
It doesn't require rJava and is using 'Rcpp' for speed.
If you are running into the same problem and R is giving you an error -- could not find function ".jnew" -- Just install the library rJava. Or if you have it already just run the line library(rJava). That should be the problem.
Also, it should be clear to everybody that csv and txt files are easier to work with, but life is not easy and sometimes you just have to open an xlsx.
For me the openxlx package worked in the easiest way.
install.packages("openxlsx")
library(openxlsx)
rawData<-read.xlsx("your.xlsx");
I recently discovered Schaun Wheeler's function for importing excel files into R after realising that the xlxs package hadn't been updated for R 3.1.0.
https://gist.github.com/schaunwheeler/5825002
The file name needs to have the ".xlsx" extension and the file can't be open when you run the function.
This function is really useful for accessing other peoples work. The main advantages over using the read.csv function are when
Importing multiple excel files
Importing large files
Files that are updated regularly
Using the read.csv function requires manual opening and saving of each Excel document which is time consuming and very boring. Using Schaun's function to automate the workflow is therefore a massive help.
Big props to Schaun for this solution.
What's your operating system? What version of R are you running: 32-bit or 64-bit? What version of Java do you have installed?
I had a similar error when I first started using the read.xlsx() function and discovered that my issue (which may or may not be related to yours; at a minimum, this response should be viewed as "try this, too") was related to the incompatability of .xlsx pacakge with 64-bit Java. I'm fairly certain that the .xlsx package requires 32-bit Java.
Use 32-bit R and make sure that 32-bit Java is installed. This may address your issue.
You have checked that R is actually able to find the file, e.g. file.exists("C:/AB_DNA_Tag_Numbers.xlsx") ? – Ben Bolker Aug 14 '11 at 23:05
Above comment should've solved your problem:
require("xlsx")
read.xlsx("filepath/filename.xlsx",1)
should work fine after that.
I have tried very hard on all the answers above. However, they did not actually help because I used a mac. The rio library has this import function which can basically import any type of data file into Rstudio, even those file using languages other than English!
Try codes below:
library(rio)
AB <- import("C:/AB_DNA_Tag_Numbers.xlsx")
AB <- AB[,1]
Hope this help.
For more detailed reference: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rio/vignettes/rio.html
You may be able to keep multiple tabs and more formatting information if you export to an OpenDocument Spreadsheet file (ods) or an older Excel format and import it with the ODS reader or the Excel reader you mentioned above.
As stated by many here, I am writing the same thing but with an additional point!
At first we need to make sure that our R Studio has these two packages installed:
"readxl"
"XLConnect"
In order to load a package in R you can use the below function:
install.packages("readxl/XLConnect")
library(XLConnect)
search()
search will display the list of current packages being available in your R Studio.
Now another catch, even though you might have these two packages but still you may encounter problem while reading "xlsx" file and the error could be like "error: more columns than column name"
To solve this issue you can simply resave your excel sheet "xlsx" in to
"CSV (Comma delimited)"
and your life will be super easy....
Have fun!!
The installation of xlsx package require rJava and xlsxjars. Indirectly they require the specific (32 or 64 bit) java runtime environment on the system.
Pro of read.xlsx: In the same package there are read.xlsx and write.xlsx
Con: Very low speed
As suggested, the easy way is to save in .csv format from excel.
Simple benchmark on a 5800x15 dataset (median)
read.xlsx: >10000ms
read_xlsx: 70ms
read.csv: 15ms

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