Import data

Import large files

The regular tools used to import CSV or Excel files do not work with “large” files¹For instance, I couldn’t import a ~20Mb CSV file made of 480.000 rows..

I personally used fread() from data.table. On top of importing large CSV files in a breeze, it also provides neat options for weirdly-formatted files (yes, I am looking at you, Mesa). Depending on your needs, another package may be of a better help (see sources).

data <- fread("data.csv")

data is not an actual data frame. You may need to convert it.

Sources:

• fread() and other solutions
• data.table on CRAN
• Even more solutions