col_types

You can also specify which types the columns in your imported data frame should have. You can do this with col_types. If set to NULL, the default, functions from the readr package will try to find the correct types themselves. You can manually set the types with a string, where each character denotes the class of the column: character, double, integer and logical. _ skips the column as a whole.

potatoes.txt (view), a flat file with tab-delimited records and without column names, is again available in your workspace.

In the second read_tsv() call, edit the col_types argument to import all columns as characters (c). Store the resulting data frame in potatoes_char.
Print out the structure of potatoes_char and verify whether all column types are chr, short for character.

Exercise

col_types

Instructions