How to quickly load some sample data (in R)

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Task

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

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

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library(datasets)

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

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

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  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.

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Contributed by Nathan Carter (ncarter@bentley.edu)