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Exercise

Reading a European .csv

In most of Europe, commas (rather than periods) are used as decimal points. This creates an issue for comma-separated value files: since commas can no longer be used to separate values, semicolons are used instead.

For this reason, readr provides read_csv2(), which looks for ; to indicate column breaks and , to indicate decimal points. Other than that, it behaves just like read_csv().

In this exercise, you'll see what happens when you incorrectly use read_csv() on datasets that contain values separated by semicolons. You'll import a dataset that contains information on the girth, height, and volume for Black Cherry Trees.

Instructions

100 XP

The readr package and the trees.csv file are loaded in your workspace.

  • Correctly import trees.csv with the read_csv2() function and store the result as trees.
  • View the dimensions of trees using the dim() function and print the first six rows of trees to the console.
  • Now incorrectly import the data with read_csv() and store the result as trees_wrong.
  • View the dimensions of trees_wrong using the dim() function and print the first six rows of trees_wrong to the console.