To keep the package slim, all non-essential formats are supported via “Suggests” packages, which are not installed (or loaded) by default. Rio supports a variety of different file formats for import and export. The convert function therefore combines import and export to easily convert between file formats (thus providing a FOSS replacement for programs like Stat/Transfer or Sledgehammer).

Transferring data files between various proprietary formats is always a pain and often expensive. By taking away the need to manually match a file type (which a beginner may not recognize) to a particular import or export function, rio allows almost all common data formats to be read with the same function.īy making import and export easy, it’s an obvious next step to also use R as a simple data conversion utility. This is the same logic used by Windows OS, for example, in determining what application is associated with a given file type. Specifically, rio uses the file extension of a file name to determine what kind of file it is.

The core advantage of rio is that it makes assumptions that the user is probably willing to make. rio aims to unify data I/O (importing and exporting) into two simple functions: import() and export() so that beginners (and experienced R users) never have to think twice (or even once) about the best way to read and write R data. Faster, simpler, packages with fewer dependencies have been created for many of the file types described in that document. And, despite all of that text, most of the packages described are (to varying degrees) out-of-date. Indeed, R supplies an entire manual describing the process of data import/export. This process is, probably unnecessarily, extremely complex for beginning R users. The idea behind rio is to simplify the process of importing data into R and exporting data from R.

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