Reading large integers

When importing massive datasets, it may be desirable to import numbers without decimals as integers since integers take up less space. Base R functions (such as read.csv(), read.table(), etc.) do this by default when the numbers are less than 2^31 - 1 (or 2147483647). However, columns with numbers greater than this are imported as numeric type by default.

If the bit64 package is installed, fread() can import these columns with huge numbers as the integer64 type which is implemented in bit64 package, by default.

You will be importing the following file:

id,name,val
9002019291929192,Robert Whitaker, 200
9200129401349301 ,Elisa Waters,190  
9200149429834456 , Karla Schmidt,458

This exercise is part of the course

Data Manipulation with data.table in R

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Exercise instructions

Import the sample.csv file using fread() and read.csv().
Print the class of the id columns in fread_import and base_import.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Import the file using fread 
fread_import <- ___("sample.csv")

# Import the file using read.csv 
base_import <- ___("sample.csv")

# Check the class of id column
___(fread_import$id)
class(base_import$id)

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