Code to import data from a Stack overflow query into R

Question

When I try to answer a question in Stack Overflow about R, a good part of my time is spent trying to rebuild the data given as example (unless the question author has been nice enough to provide them as R code).

So my question is, if somebody just asks a question and gives his sample data frame the following way :

a  b   c
1 11 foo
2 12 bar
3 13 baz
4 14 bar
5 15 foo

Do you have a tip or a function to import this easily into an R session, without having to type the entire data.frame() instruction ?

Thanks in advance for any hint !

PS : sorry if the term "query" is not really nice in my question title, but it seems you can't use the word "question" in a question title in Stack overflow :-)

Answer 1

Maybe textConnection() is what you want here:

R> zz <- read.table(textConnection("a  b   c
1 11 foo
2 12 bar
3 13 baz
4 14 bar
5 15 foo"), header=TRUE)
R> zz
  a  b   c
1 1 11 foo
2 2 12 bar
3 3 13 baz
4 4 14 bar
5 5 15 foo
R> 

It allows you to treat the text as a "connection" from which to read. You can also just copy and paste, but access from the clipboard is more dependent on the operating system and hence less portable.

Answer 2

Recent version of R now offer an even lower keystroke option than the textConnection route for entry of columnar data into read.table and friends. faced with this:

zz
  a  b   c
1 1 11 foo
2 2 12 bar
3 3 13 baz
4 4 14 bar
5 5 15 foo

One can simply insert : <- read.table(text=" after the zz, delete the carriage-return and then insert ", header=TRUE) after the last foo and type [enter].

zz<- read.table(text="  a  b   c
1 1 11 foo
2 2 12 bar
3 3 13 baz
4 4 14 bar
5 5 15 foo", header=TRUE)

One can also use scan to efficiently enter long sequences of pure numbers or pure character vector entries. Faced with: 67 75 44 25 99 37 6 96 77 21 31 41 5 52 13 46 14 70 100 18 , one can simply type: zz <- scan() and hit [enter]. Then paste the selected numbers and hit [enter] again and perhaps a second time to cause a double carriage-return and the console should respond "read 20 items".

> zz <- scan()
1: 67  75  44  25  99  37   6  96  77  21  31  41   5  52  13  46  14  70 100  18
21: 
Read 20 items

The "character" task. after pasting to console and editing out extraneous line-feeds and adding quotes, then hitting [enter]:

> countries <- scan(what="character")
1:     'republic of congo'
2:     'republic of the congo'
3:     'congo, republic of the'
4:     'congo, republic'
5: 'democratic republic of the congo'
6: 'congo, democratic republic of the'
7: 'dem rep of the congo'
8: 
Read 7 items

Answer 3

You can also ask the questioner to use the dput function which dumps any data structure in a way that can be just copy-pasted into R. e.g.

> zz
  a  b   c
1 1 11 foo
2 2 12 bar
3 3 13 baz
4 4 14 bar
5 5 15 foo

> dput(zz)
structure(list(a = 1:5, b = 11:15, c = structure(c(3L, 1L, 2L, 
1L, 3L), .Label = c("bar", "baz", "foo"), class = "factor")), .Names = c("a", 
"b", "c"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -5L))

> xx <- structure(list(a = 1:5, b = 11:15, c = structure(c(3L, 1L, 2L, 
+ 1L, 3L), .Label = c("bar", "baz", "foo"), class = "factor")), .Names = c("a", 
+ "b", "c"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -5L))
> xx
  a  b   c
1 1 11 foo
2 2 12 bar
3 3 13 baz
4 4 14 bar
5 5 15 foo