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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.

This is a part of the course

“Introduction to Importing Data in R”

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Exercise instructions

  • 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.

Hands-on interactive exercise

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

# Column names
properties <- c("area", "temp", "size", "storage", "method",
                "texture", "flavor", "moistness")

# Import all data, but force all columns to be character: potatoes_char
potatoes_char <- read_tsv("potatoes.txt", col_types = "iiiiiddd", col_names = properties)

# Print out structure of potatoes_char
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