| write.table {base} | R Documentation |
write.table prints its required argument x (after
converting it to a data frame if it is not one already) to
file. The entries in each line (row) are separated by the
value of sep.
write.table(x, file = "", append = FALSE, quote = TRUE, sep = " ",
eol = "\n", na = "NA", dec = ".", row.names = TRUE,
col.names = TRUE, qmethod = c("escape", "double"))
x |
the object to be written, typically a data frame. If not, it
is attempted to coerce x to a data frame. |
file |
either a character string naming a file or a connection.
"" indicates output to the console. |
append |
logical. If TRUE, the output is appended to the
file. If FALSE, any existing file of the name is destroyed. |
quote |
a logical value or a numeric vector. If TRUE, any
character or factor columns will be surrounded by double quotes. If
a numeric vector, its elements are taken as the indices of the
columns to quote. In both cases, row and column names
are quoted if they are written. If FALSE, nothing is quoted. |
sep |
the field separator string. Values within each row of
x are separated by this string. |
eol |
the character(s) to print at the end of each line (row). |
na |
the string to use for missing values in the data. |
dec |
the string to use for decimal points. |
row.names |
either a logical value indicating whether the row
names of x are to be written along with x, or a
character vector of row names to be written. |
col.names |
either a logical value indicating whether the column
names of x are to be written along with x, or a
character vector of column names to be written. |
qmethod |
a character string specifying how to deal with embedded
double quote characters when quoting strings. Must be one of
"escape" (default), in which case the quote character is
escaped in C style by a backslash, or "double", in which case
it is doubled. You can specify just the initial letter. |
Normally there is no column name for a column of row names. If
col.names=NA a blank column name is added. This can be used to
write CSV files for input to spreadsheets.
write.table can be slow for data frames with large numbers
(hundreds or more) of columns: this is inevitable as each column could
be of a different class and so must be handled separately.
Function write.matrix in package MASS
may be much more efficient if x is a matrix or can be
represented in a numeric matrix.
The “R Data Import/Export” manual.
## Not run:
## To write a CSV file for input to Excel one might use
write.table(x, file = "foo.csv", sep = ",", col.names = NA)
## and to read this file back into R one needs
read.table("file.csv", header = TRUE, sep = ",", row.names=1)
## End(Not run)