Safely Read Data from a File — read_data

Attempts to read a file (comma delimited by default) into a data frame. Please note files with the extension .csv, and .DAT are both comma delimited files. If the file does not exist, is a directory, is empty, or an error occurs during reading, this function returns an empty data frame (0 rows, 0 columns).

Usage

read_data_safely(file, sep = ",", header = FALSE)

Arguments

file: What's the path to your data file? This should be a single string giving the path to the file.
sep: Field separator; passed to read.table(). Defaults to "," for comma delimited files like .csv and .DAT.
header: Logical; does your data file have a header row (i.e., column names)? Defaults to FALSE. If yor file contains column names at the top, please set this to TRUE.

Value

A data frame of the file’s contents, or an empty data frame if the file is missing, is a directory, is empty, or cannot be read.

Examples

# create a small CSV and read it
tmp <- tempfile(fileext = ".csv")
write.csv(data.frame(a = 1:3, b = 4:6), tmp, row.names = FALSE)
read_data_safely(tmp)
#>   V1 V2
#> 1  a  b
#> 2  1  4
#> 3  2  5
#> 4  3  6
unlink(tmp)