Chapter 2

Working with Packages, Importing, and Exporting

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Installing packages

Bullet Examining data

Bullet Exploring a tidy little universe

Bullet Reading from files and writing to files

Apackage is a collection of functions and data that augments R. If you’re looking for data to work with, you’ll find many data frames in R packages. If you’re looking for a specialized function that’s not in the basic R installation, you can probably find it in a package.

Installing Packages

As the Packages tab (in the Files/Plots/Packages/Help/Viewer pane of RStudio) shows, many packages come with the basic R installation, but if you want to work with them, you have to install them. This means putting them in a directory called the library. To get one of these comes-with-basic-R packages into the library, you click the Packages tab. Figure 2-1 shows this tab.

Screenshot of the packages tab in RStudio.

FIGURE 2-1: The Packages tab in RStudio.

Scroll down until you find the package you’re looking for. For this example, I work with the

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