smart_read: Read a data file

Description

A simple function that imports a file without the users needing to specify information about the file type (see Details for more). The smart_read() function uses the file's extension to determine the appropriate function to read the data. Additionally, characters are converted to factors by default, mostly for compatibility with iNZight (https://inzight.nz).

Usage

smart_read(
  file,
  ext = tools::file_ext(file),
  preview = FALSE,
  column_types = NULL,
  ...
)

Value

A dataframe with some additional attributes:

name is the name of the file
code contains the 'tidyverse' code used to read the data
sheets contains names of sheets if 'file' is an Excel file (can be retrieved using the sheets() helper function)

Arguments

file: the file path to read
ext: file extension, namely "csv" or "txt"
preview: logical, if TRUE only the first few rows of the data will be returned
column_types: vector of column types (see ?readr::read_csv)
...: additional parameters passed to read_* functions

Reading delimited files

By default, smart_read() will detect the delimiter used in the file if the argument delimiter = NULL is passed in (the default). If this does not work, you can override this argument:

smart_read('path/to/file', delimiter = '+')

Author

Tom Elliott

Details

Currently, smart_read() understands the following file types:

delimited (.csv, .txt)
Excel (.xls, .xlsx)
SPSS (.sav)
Stata (.dta)
SAS (.sas7bdat, .xpt)
R data (.rds)
JSON (.json)