How to quickly load some sample data

Description

Sometimes you just need to try out a new piece of code, whether it be data manipulation, statistical computation, plotting, or whatever. And it’s handy to be able to quickly load some example data to work with. There is a lot of freely available sample data out there. What’s the easiest way to load it?

Solution, in Julia

View this solution alone.

The R programming language comes with many free datasets built in. To make these same datasets available to Julia programmers as well, you can install and import the RDatasets package.

First, ensure that you have it installed, by running the Julia commands using Pkg and then Pkg.add( "RDatasets" ). Then you can get access to many datasets as follows:

1
2
3
using RDatasets
iris = dataset( "datasets", "iris" )
first( iris, 5 ) # just show the first 5 rows

But what datasets are available? There are many! You can find a full list in the package itself.

1
RDatasets.packages()

Content last modified on 24 July 2023.

See a problem? Tell us or edit the source.

Solution, in Python

View this solution alone.

The R programming language comes with many free datasets built in. To make these same datasets available to Python programmers as well, you can install and import the rdatasets package.

First, ensure that you have it installed, by running pip install rdatasets or conda install rdatasets from your command line. Then you can get access to many datasets as follows:

1
2
3
from rdatasets import data
df = data( 'iris' )  # Load the famous Fisher's irises dataset
df.head()

But what datasets are available? There are many! You can find a full list in the package itself.

1
2
from rdatasets import summary
summary()

Content last modified on 24 July 2023.

See a problem? Tell us or edit the source.

Solution, in R

View this solution alone.

R comes with many datasets in its datasets package. Ensure that you have it installed as follows.

1
library(datasets)

Then you can load any one of them with the data function, as follows.

1
2
data(iris)  # Load the famous Fisher's irises dataset.
head(iris)  # It has been placed in a variable of the same name.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
  Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
1 5.1          3.5         1.4          0.2         setosa 
2 4.9          3.0         1.4          0.2         setosa 
3 4.7          3.2         1.3          0.2         setosa 
4 4.6          3.1         1.5          0.2         setosa 
5 5.0          3.6         1.4          0.2         setosa 
6 5.4          3.9         1.7          0.4         setosa 

To page through a list of all available datasets, just call data() with no arguments.

Content last modified on 24 July 2023.

See a problem? Tell us or edit the source.

Topics that include this task

• Bentley University GB213
• Bentley University GR521
• Bentley University MA346

Opportunities

This website does not yet contain a solution for this task in any of the following software packages.

• Excel

If you can contribute a solution using any of these pieces of software, see our Contributing page for how to help extend this website.