Read a CSV and preview first X rows and columns

The purpose of this function is combine the functionality of read.csv and print, which are often used together.

The purpose of this function is to read data from a file into a variable and simultaneously display a preview of the data, showing either the first few rows or columns based on the user's specification. It is important to emphasize that the function expects the user to assign the result of the read operation to a variable in order to achieve its intended purpose. eg. Use var1 = read.csv.print(file1) instead of read.csv.print(file1)

Usage

read.csv.print(
  file,
  header = TRUE,
  sep = ",",
  quote = "\"",
  dec = ".",
  fill = TRUE,
  comment.char = "",
  ...,
  dim = c(10L, 5L)
)

Arguments

file

the name of the file which the data are to be read from. Each row of the table appears as one line of the file. If it does not contain an absolute path, the file name is relative to the current working directory, getwd(). Tilde-expansion is performed where supported. This can be a compressed file (see file).

Alternatively, file can be a readable text-mode connection (which will be opened for reading if necessary, and if so closed (and hence destroyed) at the end of the function call). (If stdin() is used, the prompts for lines may be somewhat confusing. Terminate input with a blank line or an EOF signal, Ctrl-D on Unix and Ctrl-Z on Windows. Any pushback on stdin() will be cleared before return.)

file can also be a complete URL. (For the supported URL schemes, see the ‘URLs’ section of the help for url.)

header

a logical value indicating whether the file contains the names of the variables as its first line. If missing, the value is determined from the file format: header is set to TRUE if and only if the first row contains one fewer field than the number of columns.

sep

the field separator character. Values on each line of the file are separated by this character. If sep = "" (the default for read.table) the separator is ‘white space’, that is one or more spaces, tabs, newlines or carriage returns.

quote

the set of quoting characters. To disable quoting altogether, use quote = "". See scan for the behaviour on quotes embedded in quotes. Quoting is only considered for columns read as character, which is all of them unless colClasses is specified.

dec

the character used in the file for decimal points.

fill

logical. If TRUE then in case the rows have unequal length, blank fields are implicitly added. See ‘Details’.

comment.char

character: a character vector of length one containing a single character or an empty string. Use "" to turn off the interpretation of comments altogether.

...

Further arguments to be passed to read.table.

dim

dimension of CSV content to show

Value

read csv content and a print out of the data head

Details

Read a dataset of type csv and show x rows and y columns with one function call

Examples

if (FALSE) {
# Example: read a csv file and print the first 10 lines
# declare file
new.file <- "test.csv"

# read file and preview default
dth3 <- read.csv.print(file = new.file)

# read file and preview 10 rows and all columns
dth1 <- read.csv.print(file = new.file, dim = 10)

# read file and preview 10 rows and 5 columns
dth2 <- read.csv.print(file = new.file, dim = c(10,5))
}