R language can read and write data into various file formats like csv, excel xml etc. In this R programming tutorial, I’ll show you how to read CSV in R. Here I’ll also include simple example to demonstrate this concept clearly. We can read csv file in two ways. I will show you both of them.

At first we have to check in which directory which directory the R workspace is pointing. We can check this by getwd()function. After that, we have to set new working directory for R. To do this we have to use setwd()function.

# Get and print current working directory.
print(getwd())

After executing the code, it will produce the result below:

[1] "/web/com/1441086124_2016"

Now we will set our new directory:

# Set current working directory.
setwd("C:\Users\CrazyProgrammer\Desktop")

I have an input.csv file. It has 5columns and 8 rows.

Following is a simple example of read.csv()function to read a CSV file available in your current working directory –

data <- read.csv("file_name.csv")

Now we are going to read our csv file and then print it

data <- read.csv("input.csv")
print(data)

When we will execute the above code, our output looks like this −

      id,   name,    salary,   start_date,     dept
1      1    Rick     623.30    2012-01-01      IT
2      2    Dan      515.20    2013-09-23      Operations
3      3    Michelle 611.00    2014-11-15      IT
4      4    Ryan     729.00    2014-05-11      HR
5      5    Gary     843.25    2015-03-27      Finance
6      6    Nina     578.00    2013-05-21      IT
7      7    Simon    632.80    2013-07-30      Operations
8      8    Guru     722.50    2014-06-17      Finance

Now I am going to discuss about the easiest way to read a file from .csv.

Syntax

read.csv('Path where your CSV file is located on your computer\File_Name.csv')

If we want data container header, then we need to write like this

read.csv('Path where your CSV file is located on your computer\File_Name.csv', header = TRUE)

Example of Read in CSV R

read.csv(' C:\Users\CrazyProgrammer\Desktop\input.csv')

Our output looks like—

1      1    Rick     623.30    2012-01-01      IT
2      2    Dan      515.20    2013-09-23      Operations
3      3    Michelle 611.00    2014-11-15      IT
4      4    Ryan     729.00    2014-05-11      HR
5      5    Gary     843.25    2015-03-27      Finance
6      6    Nina     578.00    2013-05-21      IT
7      7    Simon    632.80    2013-07-30      Operations
8      8    Guru     722.50    2014-06-17      Finance

If we want data container header, then

read.csv(' C:\Users\CrazyProgrammer\Desktop\input.csv', header = TRUE))

Now, our output looks like–

      id,   name,    salary,   start_date,     dept
1      1    Rick     623.30    2012-01-01      IT
2      2    Dan      515.20    2013-09-23      Operations
3      3    Michelle 611.00    2014-11-15      IT
4      4    Ryan     729.00    2014-05-11      HR
5      5    Gary     843.25    2015-03-27      Finance
6      6    Nina     578.00    2013-05-21      IT
7      7    Simon    632.80    2013-07-30      Operations
8      8    Guru     722.50    2014-06-17      Finance

Related Post:
How to Read text file in R?

Today we have learned about how to read CSV in R programming language. I hope you guys understood everything clearly. So, guys, that’s all about for today. Later we will discuss another topic of r programming language. Till then, take care. Happy Coding