Appendix A — Functions for reading data into R

R can read data in many different formats. Different functions (often from different packages) are needed to read files of different formats. These are some of the functions needed to read common types of file used in data analysis, including spatial data formats.

Functions for reading data into R

Data file type	Package	Function	Can load compressed files?	Can load files from URL?
Comma-separated values (.csv)	readr	read_csv() (data from English-speaking countries) or read_csv2() (data from elsewhere)	yes	yes
Fixed-width files (usually .txt)	readr	read_fwf()	yes	yes
GeoJSON (.geojson)	sf	read_sf()	no	yes
GeoPackage (.gpkg)	sf	read_sf()	no	yes
Google Sheets	googlesheets4	read_sheet()	n/a	yes
HTML (.htm or .html)	xml2	read_html() (probably used with functions from the rvest package)	n/a	yes
JSON (.json)	jsonlite	read_json()	yes	yes
Microsoft Excel (.xlsx or .xls)	readxl	read_excel()	no	no
OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods)	readODS	read_ods()	no	yes
R Data (.rds)	readr	read_rds()	n/a	yes
SAS (.sas7bdat)	haven	read_sas()	yes	yes
Shapefile (.shp)	sf	read_sf()	no	no
SPSS Statistics (.sav)	haven	read_sav()	yes	yes
Stata (.dta)	haven	read_dta()	yes	yes
Tab-separated values (.tsv or .tab)	readr	read_tsv()	yes	yes
XML (usually .xml)	xml2	read_xml()	yes	yes