Read and write csv.gz file in R - r

There are very similar questions about this topic, but non deals with this under R quite precisely.
I have a csv.gz file and I would like to "unzip" the file and have it as ordinary *.csv file. I suppose one would go about first reading the csv.gz file and latter via write.csv command create the csv file itself.
Here what I have tried a part of other things:
gz.file <- read.csv(gzfile(file.choose()), as.is = TRUE)
gives:
head(gz.file)
farmNo.milk.energy.vet.cows
1 1;862533;117894;21186;121
2 2;605764;72049;43910;80
3 3;865658;158466;54583;95
4 4;662331;66783;45469;87
5 5;1003444;101714;81625;125
6 6;923512;252408;96807;135
File claims to be data.frame but doesn't behave like one, what I'm missing here?
class(gz.file)
[1] "data.frame"
Once read into memory I would like to have it in pure csv file, so would write.csv would be the solution?
write.csv(gz.file, file="PATH")

In recent versions of data.table fast csv reader fread got support for csv.gz files. It automatically detects if it needs to decompress based on the filename so there is not much new to learn. Following should work.
library(data.table)
dt = fread("data.csv.gz")
This feature requires extra, fortunately lightweight, dependency as you can read in ?fread manual
Compressed files ending .gz and .bz2 are supported if the R.utils package is installed.
To write compressed argument use fwrite(compress="gzip").

tidyverse, particularly the readr package, has transparent support of gzip compressed files (and a few others)
library(readr)
read_csv("file.csv.gz") -> d
# write uncompressed data
d %>% write_csv("file.csv")

Related

fread() of file from archive

I would like to know what is the recommended way of reading a data.table from an archived file (zip archive in my case). One obvious option is to unzip it to a temporary file and then fread() it as usual. I don't want to bother about creating new file, so instead I use read.table() from unz() connection and then convert it with data.table():
mydt <- data.table(read.table(unz(myzipfilename, myfilename)))
This works fine but read.table() is slow for big files while fread() can't read unz() connection directly. I'm wondering if there is any better solution.
Look at: Read Ziped CSV File with fread
To avoid tmp files you can use unzip with -p extract files to pipe, no messages
You can use such a kind of statements with fread.
x = fread('unzip -p test/allRequests.csv.zip')
Or with gunzip
x = fread('gunzip -cq test/allRequests.csv.gz')
You can also use grep or other tools.

read.sas7bdat unable to read compressed file

I am trying to read a .sas7bdat file in R. When I use the command
library(sas7bdat)
read.sas7bdat("filename")
I get the following error:
Error in read.sas7bdat("county2.sas7bdat") : file contains compressed data
I do not have experience with SAS, so any help will be highly appreciated.
Thanks!
According to the sas7bdat vignette [vignette('sas7bdat')], COMPRESS=BINARY (or COMPRESS=YES) is not currently supported as of 2013 (and this was the vignette active on 6/16/2014 when I wrote this). COMPRESS=CHAR is supported.
These are basically internal compression routines, intended to make filesizes smaller. They're not as good as gz or similar (not nearly as good), but they're supported by SAS transparently while writing SAS programs. Obviously they change the file format significantly, hence the lack of implementation yet.
If you have SAS, you need to write these to an uncompressed dataset.
options compress=no;
libname lib '//drive/path/to/files';
data lib.want;
set lib.have;
run;
That's the simplest way (of many), assuming you have a libname defined as lib as above and change have and want to names that are correct (have should be the filename without extension of the file, in most cases; want can be changed to anything logical with A-Z or underscore only, and 32 or fewer characters).
If you don't have SAS, you'll have to ask your data provided to make the data available uncompressed, or as a different format. If you're getting this from a PUDS somewhere on the web, you might post where you're getting it from and there might be a way to help you identify an uncompressed source.
This admittedly is not a pure R solution, but in many situations (e.g. if you aren't on a pc and don't have the ability to write the SAS file yourself) the other solutions posted are not workable.
Fortunately, Python has a module (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sas7bdat) which supports reading compressed SAS data sets - it's certainly better using this than needing to acquire SAS if you don't already have it. Once you extract the file and save it to text via Python, you can then access it in R.
from sas7bdat import SAS7BDAT
import pandas as pd
InFileName = "myfile.sas7bdat"
OutFileName = "myfile.txt"
with SAS7BDAT(InFileName) as f:
df = f.to_data_frame()
df.to_csv(path_or_buf = OutFileName, sep = "\t", encoding = 'utf-8', index = False)
The haven package can read compressed SAS-files:
library(haven)
df <- read_sas("sasfile.sas7bdat")
But only SAS-files which are compressed using compress=char, but not compress=binary.
So haven will be able to read this SAS-file:
data output.compressed_data_char (compress=char);
set inputdata;
run;
But not this SAS-file:
data output.compressed_data_binary (compress=binary);
set inputdata;
run;
https://cran.r-project.org/package=haven
http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrcon/62955/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a001002773.htm
"RevoScaleR" is a good package to read SAS data sets (compressed or uncompressed).You can use rxImport function of this package. Below is the example
Importing library
library(RevoScaleR)
Reading data
R_df_name <- rxImport("fake_path/file_name.sas7bdat")
The speed of this function is far better than haven/sas7bdat/sas7bdat.parso. I hope this helps anyone who struggles to read SAS data sets in R.
Cheers!
I found R to be the easiest for this kind of challenge, especially with compressed sas7dbat files, three simple lines:
library(haven)
data <- read_sas("yourfile.sas7dbat")
and then transform it to csv
write.csv(data,"data.csv")

Read a zipped .csv file in R

I have been trying hard to solve this, but I cannot get my head around how to read zipped .csv files in R. I could first unzip the files and then read them, but since the amount of unzipped data is around 22GB, I guess it is more practical to handle zipped files.
I basically have many .csv files, which I ZIPPED ONE BY ONE into single .7z files. Every file is named like: file1.csv, file2.csv, etc., which zipped became respectively: file1.csv.7z, file2.csv.7z, etc.
If I use the following command:
data <- read.table(unz("substn-20100101.csv.7z", "substn-20100101.csv"), nrows=10, header=T, quote="\"", sep=",")
I get the message:
Error in open.connection(file, "rt") : cannot open the connection
In addition: Warning message:
In open.connection(file, "rt") : cannot open zip file 'substn-20100101.7z'
Any help would be much appreciated, thank you in advance.
First of all if your problem is RAM, as you said each file has 22G, using compressed files won't resolve your problems. After read.table, for example, all file will be loaded in memory. If you are using these files to some kind of modeling i advise you to look at ff and bigmemory packages.
Another solution is use Revolutions R that has an academic licence and you can use for free. Revolutions R provides Big Data capabilities and you can manage this files easily with packages like revoscaleR.
Even another solution is using Postgres + MADLib + PivotalR. After ingesting data at Postgres, use PivotalR package to access that data and do models with MADLib library, directly from R console.
BUT, if you are planing something that be done with chunks of data, summary for example, you can use the package iterators. I will provide an use case to show how this can be done. Get Airlines data, 1988, and follow this code:
> install.packages('iterators')
> library(iterators)
> con <- bzfile('1988.csv.bz2', 'r')
OK, now you have a connection to your file. Let's create an iterator:
> it <- ireadLines(con, n=1) ## read just one line from the connection (n=1)
Just to test:
> nextElem(it)
and you will see something like:
1 "1988,1,9,6,1348,1331,1458,1435,PI,942,NA,70,64,NA,23,17,SYR,BWI,273,NA,NA,0,NA,0,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA"
> nextElem(it)
and you will see the next line, and so on. Be aware that you are reading a line at a time, so you are not loading all the file to RAM.
If you want to read line by line till the end of the file you can use
> tryCatch(expr=nextElem(it), error=function(e) return(FALSE))
for example. When the file ends it return a logical FALSE.
If I understand the question correctly, at least on Windows OS, you could use 7-Zip Command-Line.
For the sake of simplicity put 7za.exe in your R working directory (and your 7zip files), create .bat file with the following text in it:
"7za e *.7z -y"
...than in R you run the following code:
my_batch <- "your_bat_file_name.bat"
shell.exec(shQuote(paste(my_batch), type = "cmd"))
Than you just read.table()...
It works for me.
According to the readr package documentation, readr::read_csv and fellows will automatically unzip files ending in .gz, .bz2, .xz, or .zip. Although .7z is not mentioned, perhaps a solution is to change to one of these compression formats and then use readr (which also offers a number of other benefits). If your data is compressed with zip, your code would be:
library(readr)
data <- read_csv("substn-20100101.csv.zip", n_max=10)

How to directly perform write.csv in R into tar.gz format?

I have a big data.frame that I want to write into a compressed CSV file. Is there any way to directly write the data into a CSV.TAR.GZ compressed file instead of performing write.csv/gzip steps in order to reduce DISK access?
Thanks.
Use gzfile (or bzfile for bzip2 archiving, or xzfile for xz archiving).
write.csv(mtcars, file=gzfile("mtcars.csv.gz"))
PS. If you only have one data frame, surely you don't need tar.

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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