Stack Overflow: reading data
Contents
One of the tedious thing in Stack Overflow is to grab example data provided by users in order to be able to use it to reproduce the case and try to solve it. Here is how to do it efficiently in R and Python, hope this will help you being the first to answer!
In R
library(tibble)
# Paste the text in a String, R allows multiline strings.
zz <- "Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa
2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa
3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa
"
# I have not found the way to do the same thing with one of the readr function :-(
df <- read.table(text = zz, header = TRUE) %>% as_data_frame()
df %>% head()
## # A tibble: 3 × 5
## Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
## <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <fctr>
## 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa
## 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa
## 3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa
And this is how to read data directly from the clipboard thanks to the
psych package.
df <- read.clipboard()
In Python
import pandas as pd
import io
# Paste the text by using of triple-quotes to span String literals on multiple lines
zz = """Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa
2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa
3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa
"""
df = pd.read_table(io.StringIO(zz), delim_whitespace=True)
df
## Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
## 1 5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2 setosa
## 2 4.9 3.0 1.4 0.2 setosa
## 3 4.7 3.2 1.3 0.2 setosa
It is also possible to read directly the text from the clipboard–under the hood this function calls read_table.
df = pd.read_clipboard()