Loading Files From Other Programs

User-contributed packages provide tools for loading into R data saved in many other formats. Often several packages can load the same file format – you can find them by searching on the internet.

Other types of data

To get other types of data into R, we recommend starting with the tidyverse packages listed below. They're certainly not perfect, but they are a good place to start. For rectangular data:

  • haven reads SPSS, Stata, and SAS files.

  • readxl reads excel files (both .xls and .xlsx).

  • DBI, along with a database specific backend (e.g. RMySQL, RSQLite, RPostgreSQL etc) allows you to run SQL queries against a database and return a data frame.

For hierarchical data: use jsonlite (by Jeroen Ooms) for json, and xml2 for XML. Jenny Bryan has some excellent worked examples at https://jennybc.github.io/purrr-tutorial/.

For other file types, try the R data import/export manual and the rio package.

Source: H. Wickham and G. Grolemund, https://r4ds.had.co.nz/data-import.html
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